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BIBLE 



SLAVEHOLDER NOT SINFUL; 



A. REPLY 



TO 



"SLAVEHOLDING NOT SINFUL, 

BY SAMUEL B. HOWE, D. D." 



BY 



H. D. GANSE, 

MINISTER OP THE REFORMED DUTCH CHUKni, 
FREEHOLD, N.J. 







«e 



-^nG 



NEW YORK: 
E. & E. BEINKEEHOFF, 103 FULTON "STREET. 

1856. 



M^ r 



John F. Tecvv, 

Printer and Stereotyper. 371 & 879 Broadwav 
Corner of White street. 



PREFACE. 



The publication of the following pages will, in the 
view of many, subject the author to the double imputa- 
tion : of vanity, in attempting to instruct the world upon 
a subject that has been so thoroughly discussed ; and 
of foolish fanaticism, in making the attempt when men's 
minds are so much excited concerning it. But if error 
has given itself prominence by a formal statement, the 
most familiar truths may fairly be quoted against it. 
And if men's minds are in a state even of angry excite- 
ment, the cure of the evil, if it could be found, would 
not consist in absolute silence, but in counsels so full of 
the wisdom and forbearance of Christ that they might 
at once disarm men's passions, and relieve their doubts. 
No man will claim to have reached that rare result. 
But no candid reader of the following argument will 
deny that the writer has sincerely aimed at it. If he has 
uttered one word that is wanting in true sympathy for 
good men who are seeking to deal with the evils of 
slavery in the spirit of the Gospel, let him be con- 
demned for it. If he has sought to show, in clear but 
temperate language, what that spirit demands, even 



those wlio differ from his views will apprehend no 
mischief from their expression. 

While the following discussion would not have 
been attempted, but for the publication of the pam- 
phlet, " Slaveholcling not Sinful," and while its direct 
aim is to answer all the arguments therein advanced ; 
it has, for the sake of securing as much completeness as 
the haste of its preparation, and other constant duties 
would allow, touched upon arguments for which the 
respected author of that pamphlet is not responsible. 
In most cases the distinction is noticed, 



BIBLE SLAVEHOLDING NOT SINFUL 



The argument, which it is proposed to review in the following 
pages, is entitled to the most respectful consideration. Not 
only the importance of the topic it discusses, hut the age and 
position of its author, together with his enviable reputation 
for piety and candor and sound learning, may well attract to 
it the interest of the Christian community. The Eeformed 
Dutch Church, however, may be expected to regard it with 
special attention. Of all the elements of a discussion,""' as 
earnest, and, on many accounts, as important as any that 
have marked her history, this alone survives. It offers its 
fair, un scarred front, as "An Argument before the General 
Synod of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, October, 
1855." The publication of such an argument, followed only 
by expressions of commendation, might naturally be considered 
as proving that our Church, as a body, either consents to its 
conclusions, or finds it hard to combat them. A large pro- 
portion of our ministers and laymen are unwilling to be thus 
interpreted. The desire to express the views of some of these 
and the grounds upon which they rest, has given rise to the 
following reply. 

The argument of Dr. Howe is inconclusive to not a few 
minds, and for this chief reason, namely ; the indefiniteness of 
its terms. The term " slaveholding," or " slavery," whicli is 
the fulcrum of the whole discussion, is used, without qualifi- 

* It concerned the application of the "North Carolina Classis of the Ger- 
man Reformed Church" for ecclesiastical connection with the "Reformed 
Protestant Dutch Church." 



cation, to designate the relation between Abraham and his 
servants ; between the Israelites under the law and theirs ; 
between the heathen Romans and theirs ; between the early 
Christians and theirs ; and lastly, between our own country- 
men and theirs. Now it may be true that there runs through 
all these relations one constant element ; but there may be 
fifty others that are changing, and each of these changing 
elements may be as truly essential to the system it charac- 
terizes, as that other one that is constant in them all. Now 
will the single element, upon which the name hinges, con- 
stitute so real an identity between the different systems, that 
you can argue conclusively from the aggregate of one system 
to the aggregate of another? Because the particular slave- 
holding of Abraham was not sinful, does it follow, just for 
that reason, that the particular slaveholding of any man that 
has ever lived after him, also w T as not sinful? Is a mere 
word to have in it all the force of justice and eternal law, and 
to guaranty the approbation of God to every thing it touches ? 
This surely will not be pretended. The position of the argu- 
ment before us must be, that the mere holding a man in 
involuntary servitude, that is, that slaveholding with no addi- 
tion of gratuitous cruelty is not sinful. But the proposition 
is not definite yet. For what is this mere slaveholding ? If 
some man could succeed in reducing one of our own citizens 
to bondage, and afterwards should treat him with all the 
kindness consistent with his involuntary servitude, would such 
a relation constitute the mere slaveholding which is not sin- 
ful ? The answer will doubtless be, no ; and for this reason : 
that the slave became a slave by wrong and violence, and that 
every day of his slavery repeats and aggravates the wrong of 
his capture. The very simple proposition ' Slaveholding not 
sinful,' becomes then not a little complicated, and must take 
this form — merely holding as a slave one who is rightfully a 
slave, is not sinful ; a proposition which hardly needs to be 
proved out of the Bible or any other book ; but which needs 
to bo followed up with a very careful discussion to make it 
countenance any actual slaveholding, whether in America or 
elsewhere. For the practical question immediately arises, 



When is the slave rightfully a slave? Just here cases of 
conscience may easily occur. Some of our forefathers, for 
example, who received the Guineamen fresh from the hold 
of the slave-ship, might possibly have doubted very painfully 
whether those men were rightfully slaves. Some of their 
descendants, who have inherited the institution, though they 
hold themselves ready to resolve such a difficulty very 
promptly, and would by no means own a man who had once 
been free, still perplex themselves about his children, and 
cannot decide at what generation the wrong of the ancestor's 
capture dies out, and the bondage becomes right. While 
others of them, with consciences perhaps over tender, and 
with narrow views, can never forget how the relation began, 
and confess before God that time can never justify it. Now, 
if the Bible countenances slavery at all, as we hold it does, 
it must have left us the means by which any intelligent and 
candid man can clear up all such doubts as these, and decide 
the fundamental question above proposed, namely, When is 
a slave rightfully a slave ? For when he is, of course you 
may hold him. 

The argument before us gives us no hint of the Bible's in- 
structions upon this point ; and the omission would be not a 
little strange, if it were not the rule with arguments upon 
that side. They demonstrate conclusively out of the Bible 
that slaveholding is not sinful, and never tell us out of the 
Bible what that sinless slaveholding is. We call the attention 
of those who shall construct such arguments for the future, to 
this material omission of their predecessors ; and invite them 
to make their demonstration of the Bible's approval of slavery 
intelligible, by incorporating in it the Bible's definition of a 
slave. We make the request, but it will not soon be granted. 
Not because such a definition is hard to give ; for we hold that 
when the Bible teaches morals, it teaches them clearly ; but it 
would explode the argument like a bomb-shell. No system of 
modern slavery could stand before it for a moment. If the 
candid writer of the pages before us had begun his task with 
such a definition, he would never have prosecuted it, but would 
have discarded at once the cause he had assumed. 



Such a definition we propose to offer. We wish to show, 
with all candor and distinctness, what kinds of slaves and 
of slaveholding are recognized in the word of God. 

Our information must be derived from one of two sources. 
If the Bible contains any organic law of slavery, this must 
define the Scriptural idea of slavery at once. If no such law 
exists, we must seek light from such particular examples of 
slaveholding as the Bible contains. 

Does the Bible furnish any organic law of slavery ? It 
does not. 

The curse pronounced upon Canaan can constitute no such 
law. It was what it professed to be — a curse, a prophecy of evil 
fulfilled chiefly in the subjection of the Canaanites to the nation 
of Israel. If it was intended for a law, it must be a severe 
one indeed ; for the terms of it are, " a servant of servants shall 
he be unto his brethren." Every reader of the Old Testa- 
ment knows the force of this expression. When we read of 
the "heaven of heavens," we know that the highest heaven is in- 
dicated ; the phrase " holy of holies," describes the holiest of 
holy places ; and so " servant of servants " must mean the 
most wretched and degraded of slaves. A sad fate, indeed, 
does such a law fasten upon " Sidon, Canaan's first-born, and 
Heth, and the Jebusite, and the Amorite, and the Girgasite, 
and the Hivite, and the Arkite, and the Sinite, and the 
Arvadite, and the Zemorite, and the Hamathite ;" for these 
were the descendants of Canaan, [Gen. 10,] and we know of 
no others. Let one who wishes for a slave that he may safely 
abuse, trace down the easy genealogy to some unlucky scion 
of the race, and put the law upon him. Was a more whim- 
sical plea ever heard of, than that by which this curse 
upon Canaan is made authority for African Slavery ? It is 
but justice to the argument before us to say that it has impli- 
cated itself in no such folly. 

The warrant which God gave to Abraham's slaveholdin<r 
can in no sense be called an organic law of slavery, but, at 
most, the authorization of slaveholding in that particular in- 
stance. It may stand as an example, but not as a formal law. 
1ft lie argument before us contends, as it seems to, that the 



connection of the rite of circumcision with slavery gives to 
slavery itself all the permanence of that rite, and of baptism 
which has taken its place, we claim the privilege of arguing 
similarly from the circumcision of Ishmael, which is said to 
have been by divine direction, [Gen. 17, 23,] and from the 
broad command that included " every man-child in their gen- 
erations," and thus to prove a standing law of concubinage 
and polygamy. If the New Testament had the effect to con- 
demn those practices, will Dr. Howe admit that there was a 
standing law for them till our Saviour came ? The simple 
truth is, that the circumcision, in neither case, was intended to 
confirm any usages or rights of the head of the household, but 
only to embrace in God's covenant all the members of it. 

The Mosaic law of slavery was an organic law for the 
economy to which it belonged, but no man now makes the 
code of Moses the rule of his slaveholding. Those who pay the 
greatest deference to it, only claim that they are adopting its 
principles. — But something is attempted to be made of the 
introduction of the expressions, " man-servant," and " maid- 
servant," into the Decalogue. 

Any argument for slavery, that relies upon these expres- 
sions, is entitled to no consideration till it has proved, what the 
argument before us does not venture even to assert, namely, 
that the expressions in question are distinctive, and can indi- 
cate nothing but slaves. For if the terms are general, and 
refer to slavery only by the usage of the times, the usage of 
other times may refer them just as fairly to any other class of 
servants. Just as that very word ' servant ' is constantly 
used among slaveholders in our day, both in legal and familiar 
language, to designate slaves ; and yet, if a slaveholder should 
have need to use the most general and equivocal name for 
servants of all sorts, he would be forced to use that same ex- 
pression. Against so loose an argument as that we are con- 
sidering, we are not called upon to prove anything ; but we as- 
sert, and stand ready to prove, that the original terms for 
' man-servant ' and ' maid-servant ' in the Decalogue cannot be 
shown by their etymology to have the least bint of slavery in 
them ; and that, so far as their usage is concerned, the whole 



10 

Hebrew language could, not replace them with any current 
names for servants that should not be equally tainted with 
the prevailing notion of slavery, if we except only the specific 
name for a hired servant ; and how well that exclusive term 
would have served the purpose of a law primarily intended for 
slaveholders, every reasonable man can easily decide. The 
truth is, there was no choice of language to be made. Slavery 
was so much the rule, that it reduced to its uses every equiv- 
ocal expression. We hazard nothing in saying that if the 
terms 'man-servant ' and ' maid-servant ' with all their breadth 
of meaning, were to be translated back into Hebrew, the origi- 
nal terms of the Decalogue would render them more nearly 
than would any others. To decide the perpetual lawfulness of 
slavery by the usage which such words obtained under such 
circumstances, is impossible. 

But this mere verbal reasoning, on either side, is entirely 
trifling. Every man knows that the Decalogue, though a law 
for the race, was adapted in its phraseology to the particular 
people to whom it was immediately addressed. The intro- 
duction refers to their deliverance from Egypt. The phrase, 
" The Lord thy God," so often repeated, has the same na- 
tional reference. The fifth commandment points as plainly to 
the national inheritance in Canaan, as though that land had 
been called by name ; and the fourth commandment refers to 
the peculiar terms upon which Gentiles, or strangers, should be 
suffered to dwell among them. Nay, there is, in the tenth 
commandment, a designation of the very beasts of burden that 
were then in most common use. Now, slavery was a national 
peculiarity, and being ordained of God as such, it was as inno- 
cent and lawful as any of the rest, but as truly national and 
distinctive. The rule in the interpretation of such a code is 
simply this, — That the local and national terms which it em- 
bodies are, as times and circumstances may change, to be in- 
terpreted by their nearest equivalents. It is a law which de- 
fines its meaning, not by abstractions, but by examples. God's 
relation to Israel, so peculiar in- some of its aspects, stands for 
his covenant relation to all his people. Canaan stands for any 
land where his people may dwell. The house, and the ox, and 



1] 

the ass, for all forms of property, and slave, if that be the 
word, for any lawful servant. The same reasoning that can 
prove by the bare fact that a slave was a lawful servant then, 
that he must be such the world over, can prove just as well 
that all the world has a right to the land of Canaan. If the 
enumeration of men-servants and maid-servants among arti- 
cles of property, is thought to bear upon the question, let the 
enumeration of the wife in the same list, interpreted as it must 
be by the existing notions of the husband's property in her, 
hold a wife to the same relation for all time to come ; and let 
those who prove out of the Decalogue that slaves are property, 
maintain the Mosaic arrangement in their inventory of goods ; 
namely, first the house, then the wife, then the slaves, and 
then the cattle. But, in fact, the common sense of the 
whole Christian world, not excluding the authors of the ar- 
gument before us, has settled this question, and confidently 
decided that domestics, of whatever name, are the men-servants 
and the maid-servants intended in the Decalogue. 

If any one is yet dissatisfied, and insists that the Decalogue 
does give to slavery a standing license ; surely it gives a man 
no broader claim to his slave than he can have to his cattle, 
and since the latter claim stands not by mere possession, but by 
rightful possession, so must the former. If one were suspected 
of having stolen an ox, or of having received it after it was 
stolen, he could hardly arrest the investigation by quoting the 
words "his ox" out of the Decalogue, to prove that a man 
might own an ox ; and if a similar suspicion should arise in 
regard to a slave, a similar quotation of the words " his slave," 
if the law contained them, would not bar proceedings. Such 
an expression might prove a man's right to hold a slave, which 
we do not deny, but it could not settle summarily that man's 
right to that particular slave. If it could, every master among 
us might make his servant a slave to-morrow. And so we are 
thrown back upon the fundamental question : When is a slave 
rightfully a slave ? Since the Decalogue gives us no means of 
deciding that question, it can be, in no sense, an organic law 
of slavery. 

For a reason similar to that just alluded to, the New Testa- 



12 

mcnt contains no sucli law ; for if it does, since old systems 
of slavery die out. as some have done, the organic law of 
slavery must leave us at no loss how to institute new ones. Let 
any man take in his hand the apostle's code of slavery, and go 
into any community where the institution is unknown, to 
teach them how to found it. Why should he not ? What 
standing law is there in the whole Bible, that ought to 
confound and paralyze a good man, when he attempts to 
put it in practice ? Let all preachers of the Gospel rebuke 
their sinful timidity, and instruct the world out of the New 
Testament, how slavery is to begin. The strongest advocate 
of an apostolic law of slavery will decline the task. The 
truth is, that at any abstract or contingent slavery the 
apostles never hint. There is no shred of a probability that 
the word would have been so much as named among them, 
if it had not been forced upon them by that actual and 
formidable system which they found about them. 

The Bible, then, contains no organic law of slavery, and 
the only warrant that slavery can claim from it, is that of par- 
ticular examples. For we grant very cheerfully all that the 
argument before us can be thought to prove — namely, that 
slavery of some sort is countenanced in the Bible ; — under 
the Old Testament by express law establishing and defining 
n system of slaveholding, and under the New, by such gene- 
ral injunctions to masters and slaves as at least tolerated the 
relation. Now it is true that these examples of authorized 
slaveholding may embody principles of universal application, 
and, by means of those principles, may have all the efficacy 
of an organic law ; but it rests with the friends of slavery so 
to evolve and define such principles, if indeed they exist, 
that their nature and application may be fairly seen. The 
case is just this : If the involuntary subjection of one man 
to another, for the advantage of the latter, were not named 
in the Bible at all. the Gospel would raise at least a pre- 
sumption against it. If it be named, and even approved in 
certain particular instances, the presumption remains against 
all other instances, unless they can be shown to be fairly 
parallel to these. It is an argument, not under a general 



13 

law, but from analogy, and the analogy must be shown to 
exist. Our work, then, is very simple. It is to discover, if 
we can, the essence of the Divine regulations concerning 
slavery, under the Old Testament and under the New. We 
shall then stand ready to admit that any system of slave- 
holding that shall incorporate so much of the spirit of those 
regulations as is clearly essential, has the warrant of God's 
Word, and is a kind of slaveholding that is not sinful. We 
cannot be asked to admit more. 

Slavery, under the Old Testament, whether Patriarchal 
or Mosaic, was marked by two conditions. The first was that 
essential element of control on the part of the master, and in- 
voluntary obedience upon the part of the slave, without which 
it would not have been slavery at all. But to this, another 
element was added, no less marked, and as truly essential to 
the system. Every slave, by the fact that he was a slave, 
was entitled to every religious privilege of the new commu- 
nity into which he entered. He was circumcised ; he was in- 
structed ; he was to keep the Sabbath and the feasts ; and 
whatever hope of God's favor might grow out of these op- 
portunities, was as fairly open to him as to Abraham or any 
of his children. To understand the full value of these privi- 
leges, and of the relation which embodied them, we must re 
member that at that day it pleased God to limit the knowledge 
of his will and the rites of his worship to a single people. 
To be beyond its pale was, with rare exceptions, to be a 
stranger to the covenants of promise. To be within it, was 
to be acquainted with them, and to have the opportunity of 
salvation through them. The nation which was thus dis- 
tinguished, though not insignificant for numbers, at least was 
limited. As they were about to take their place, then, upon 
the territory which was to be opened for their occupancy, 
chiefly by exterminating wars, there was surely as much 
kindness to the remnants of the nations about them as to 
themselves, in the provision that some of those Gentiles, 
already condemned for their sins, should be made at once to 
render service to God's people, and to share in God's bless- 
ings. No single word will describe that complex relation. 



14 

In one aspect, indeed, it was enslavement to men ; in an- 
other, it was adoption by God. It is easy to see which 
was the more important. Now, it was this conqilex relation 
that alone could claim the approbation of God under the Old 
Testament. He ordained, not the half, but the whole ; and 
it was such a whole that he only could ordain it, and men 
can never make a copy of it. The circumstances would need 
to return — the wall of exclusiveness, with darkness without 
it, and light within it : for if the wall is broken down, and 
the light diffused, or even diffusing, one prime condition of 
the relation is wanting. The command, " Go ye into all the 
world, and preach the Gospel to every creature," has put a 
new face upon things. There is no longer a " Jerusalem, in 
which men ought to worship," "but in every nation, he that 
feareth God and worketh righteousness is accepted of him." 
The Gospel is a leaven ; it does not concentrate its influence 
but spreads it. God's method of making men Israelites, was 
to take them to Israel. God's method of making men Chris- 
tians, is to send the Gospel to them. And even when there 
may exist some just occasion to incorporate heathen men 
into a Christian nation, the attempt to incorporate them by 
means of slavery cannot plead the warrant of Mosaic slavery 
until the new system of bondage has, like that, the author- 
ity of an express Divine command. It is safe for God to 
decide upon what terms he will have his religious blessings 
diffused, but it is not safe for men to decide for him. The 
Master has made the rule for his Church, and left no excep- 
tion — " Freely ye have received, freely give." Shame on the 
man who would sell the blood-bought blessings of the Gospel 
tor sweat and service, and plead Mosaic law for his excuse ! 
Can it be one of the approved processes of the Gospel of 
peace, that every heterogeneous nation, that just calls itself 
Christian, is endowed with such a mastership of all the 
heathen, that it may choose where it will its hewers of wood 
and its drawers of water ? There is, then, and there can be 
no identity or resemblance between the essence of Old Testa- 
ment slavery and that of any other slavery that the world 
shall ever see. That slavery was instituted solely for its 



15 

own times, just as clearly as was the Levirate law or the 
cities of refuge. That slaveholding was not sinful. It be- 
gan rightfully, in God's distinct command, and it blessed its 
subjects infinitely more than they could have been blessed 
without it. Such slaveholding would never be sinful ; but 
when shall the world see it ? 

We have not considered it essential to our argument to 
insist upon those merciful provisions of the law of Moses, 
which so largely modified the authority of the master and the 
labors of the slave. If they should be embodied into the civil 
law of slavery in our land, the friends of humanity would 
bless God for the change, and look for a speedy end of slavery 
itself. If this very inconsistency between those merciful pro- 
visions and the principle of American slavery has led to their 
exclusion from that system, what is this but a formal confes- 
sion of the point we are maintaining, namely : that Mosaic 
slavery does not admit of imitation ? For there is no resem- 
blance between the law that compensates with scrupulous 
kindness for its own severity, and thus maintains both author- 
ity and mercy, and another law which, to sustain itself at all, 
must legislate, not for mercy, but against it, and build up 
authority at the cost of its subjects. 

But it is claimed that slavery is recognized in the New 
Testament. If Mosaic slavery can be thought to be included 
in that recognition, the Gospels alone can have referred to it ; 
the Epistles certainly did not. If we should grant then, what 
cannot be proved, that the Gospels did recognize and even 
approve Mosaic slavery while it was yet lawful, that approba- 
tion would no more perpetuate it than would the Saviour's 
command to the leper, " go show thyself to the priest / " per- 
petuate the Jewish Priesthood. It is not to Mosaic slavery, 
therefore, that the New Testament argument for slavery lias 
reference ; but to Gentile slavery. This had no relation to 
that system of the Old Testament which God had ordained. 
It did not grow out of it. It sustained no analogy to it. It 
was a heathen product — the offspring of war, and indolence, 
and lust. In the words of our author, such heathen slavery 
" had its origin at a time when the world was full of idolatry 



16 

and wickedness, and seemed to be fast hastening to the same 
state of violence and crime as existed before the flood." [p. 20.] 
There was nothing in such an origin to indicate the favor of 
God. Still less, if possible, was there in the system itself. 
"By the Koman law/' says Dr. Howe, "he (Philemon) had 
the power to punish his slave, not only with scourges, but also 
with death. " [p. 26.] Shocking details of the enormities to 
which that law admitted could easily be given ; but let the fol- 
lowing general statement from the pen of the historian, Dr. 
Robertson, suffice : " Were I to mention the laws and regula- 
tions of the most civilized States among the ancients concern- 
ing these unfortunate sufferers, were I to relate the treatment 
which they met with from persons most renowned for their vir- 
tue, maxims so inhuman and treatment so barbarous would ex- 
cite the strongest pity and indignation."* Now if any single 
element of this system of wickedness and oppression was right 
and lawful, that fact is to be proved, and not assumed. The 
fair presumption is against the whole. Under these circum- 
stances the Saviour and the Apostles met it, and whatever 
lawfulness it has at all, must come from their sanction. So 
much of it as they approved, either directly or by fair implica- 
tion, surely was not sinful. What they failed to approve is 
no better now than it was at first. The process is as simple 
as a sum in subtraction. Given a system of unauthorized op- 
pression ; given those parts of it which God at length does 
authorize ; the remainder is unauthorized oppression still. 

Now we put it upon the friends of slavery to prove that 
either the Saviour or his Apostles ever approved a single 
feature of Roman slavery. We shall be told, that they re- 
cognized it so as to imply their approbation, and that they 
never condemned it. Both assertions we deny. 

They never recogm/ied it so as to approve it. Those who 
claim that they did must define their own language, and tell 
us what was so recognized and approved. Was it Roman sla- 
very in the gross ? To that monstrous conclusion, indeed, the 
argument before us fairly tends. For that was the slave- 

* Sermon on the World at the Appearance of Christ. 



17 

holding of the Centurion, whom our Saviour commended, with- 
out a word of rebuke for it, (p. 6 :) that was the slaveholding 
concerning which the apostles " gave not the slightest inti- 
mation that it was sinful, " (p. 6 ;) that was the system to 
which Paul sent back Onesimus, though it gave to his master 
"the power to punish him with death." Has the pattern 
been shown us then ? Is Roman slaveholding the slaveholding 
which is not sinful ? Then let it go down to the end of 
time. But the vicious argument runs away with its authors. 
They surely did not set out to reach that point. 

Is there, then, a certain essence of slavery that is to be 
distinguished from all the sinful accessories of Roman slavery ; 
and did the Saviour and the apostles recognize and approve 
that essence ? If that be so, then that essence must have 
been either defined or undefined. If it was undefined, who is 
competent to pronounce what the innocent essence of Roman 
slaveholding was ? How were the early Christians to know 
when they were passing beyond it into the abuses of slavery ? 
And if they could guess safely at so loose a rule, how can we 
be sure that our guess will be as happy ? It is absurd to 
speak of the divine approval of a notion that is left free to 
take a thousand different forms in as many minds. But per- 
haps that essence of mere slavery was defined. Then where ? 
Not by the bare terms, " master," and " slave." It is common 
indeed, to select the latter of these, and then to turn it into 
an abstraction ; and then to define that abstraction with nice 
analysis, and so to get rid of all the enormities of any partic- 
ular form of slaveholding. But will the authors of that 
process remember, that there were two terms used by the 
apostles, and that they have chosen only the weakest of them 
for their manipulations ? For if Aov\o$, by its derivation and 
intrinsic force, meant only bondman, Kupto<;., by derivation 
and by usage too, meant absolute master. Even English 
readers will scarcely need to be told, that it was the very 
word, which, in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, 
stood for Jehovah ; and which, in the New Testament, was 
applied to our Saviour wherever in our translation he is called 
Lord. It was the very name for absolute proprietor. Now 
2 



18 

when these two terms came together, as correlates ; as they did 
in the laws and other writings of those days, and as they did 
in the Epistles ; the weaker one did not define the stronger, 
but the stronger the weaker. The relation did not take its 
shape from the slave's mere obligation to serve, but from the 
master's absolute authority ; and so by usage Kvpws stood, 
in its own proper meaning, as the designation of power that 
was not to be questioned, and AovXos, left its etymological 
meaning of bondman to designate the subject of such power. 
No scholar will question the truth of this representation : and 
under such circumstances to drop out of view entirely the 
most significant of the apostles' terms, to trace the other back 
to a meaning far lower than constant usage assigned it, and 
then to make that isolated and weakened expression stand for 
the terms which the apostles used, is strange reasoning in- 
deed. If the terms of the apostles are to define the essence 
of slavery, let them do it, and a shocking definition we shall 
have. Where then is that definition given ? Not in Mosaic 
law, as we have seen ; for that was a pattern that can never be 
copied. To take the mere bondage out of it, and make that, 
irrespective of its peculiar compensations, the innocent essence 
of slavery, is as gross an outrage upon all justice and common 
sense, as to claim that the getting our neighbor's goods is the 
innocent essence of a bargain. If the New Testament, there- 
fore, approved any essence of slavery, the New Testament must 
define it : and thus we come to this, the only intelligible and 
consistent ground, namely, that the New Testament approves 
only so much of slavery as it approves distinctly. 

But in what shall such distinct approbation consist ? In 
other words, when the Word of God intends to authorize by 
recognition, an act or custom otherwise unauthorized, what 
form is that approving recognition to take ? This question is 
fundamental to the discussion. But the argument before us 
has not bestowed a word upon it. The truth is, we have not 
examples enough of this sort of approbation to furnish a rule. 
What questionable acts, but those of slavery, have good men 
ever attempted to support in the face of standing law, that 
seemed to condemn them, by any mere recognition that is 



19 

claimed to have approved them ? We challenge the friends 
of this argument to produce any single moral question, of one 
tithe of the importance of this of slavery, that has ever been 
settled, or approached a settlement, upon any such ground. 
And under such circumstances to say that the Saviour, or the 
apostles, approved slavery by recognizing it, is to talk at random. 
But if we have not the means of knowing in what that 
decisive recognition may consist, we have evidence enough to 
prove in what it may not. 

The mere mention of a questionable act or custom, with- 
out condemning it, does not approve it. For the sacred nar- 
rators often mention the grossest sins without express condem- 
nation, on the ground that they are sufficiently condemned 
by general laws. Thus, to be told that the slave of the High 
Priest had his ear cut off; or that a certain soothsaying 
damsel had masters ; or that a hundred other slaves did or 
suffered a hundred other things, will not be claimed by any 
one to touch very nearly the matter of the right or wrong of 
slavery. 

If such mere mention be transferred from a narrative to a 
parable, it does not then imply approbation of the act or cus- 
tom thus noticed. For a parable is a narrative of events real or 
imaginary, designed to illustrate some moral lesson. The ex- 
cellence of the parable lies in the combination of its truth to 
life or nature, with the clear illustration of the lesson proposed. 
To gain the first result, incidents are often incorporated, that 
bear only indirectly upon the second, and the rule for eli- 
citing moral or doctrinal truths out of a parable, is simply 
this ; — that the point is never to be forgotten ; and so much 
of the narrative as bears directly upon it, may safely be insist- 
ed upon ; and the rest is very precarious footing. Thus, the 
parable of the unjust steward, elaborately describes his injus- 
tice, and never condemns it ; and even commends the steward 
himself. But the commendation is of his wisdom ; and his 
wickedness must fare as well as it can. So, in other par- 
ables, our Saviour might speak of slaves and never touch 
the lawfulness of slavery, until some distinctive feature of 
slavery should be made to illustrate the very principle which 



20 

the parable was designed to enforce. No such parable can 
be found ; not even if we include that one of the unmer- 
ciful servant, quoted with the rest on page 15 of our author ; 
which, in truth, has nothing to do with slavery. It concerns 
the office of a " man that was a King." — Matt. 18. But while 
this limitation of the force of any argument for slavery that is 
based upon the parables, is strictly just, it is of little impor- 
tance, for the reason already alluded to : namely, that when 
those parables were uttered, Mosaic slavery had the full war- 
rant of God's law. Surely allusions to a custom that may 
have been purely Jewish, and so far right, could have no 
possible bearing upon the justice of slaveholding in our day. 

Again, a questionable act or custom, is not so recognized 
as to be approved, by being made the occasion of a formal 
command or regulation. For existing facts must be met ; and 
the prudence that prepares the way of meeting them, in no 
way pronounces upon the facts themselves. In other words, 
no lawgiver is to be held responsible for the facts which pre- 
cede his legislation, and demand it ; but only for such facts 
as his legislation is adapted to produce. This is most obvi- 
ously true of such laws as concern the mere endurance of wrong. 
Such are all those familiar passages of the Gospel which en- 
join patience under injuries ; the injuries are not legalized 
because it is a Christian's duty to bear them. And upon the 
very same footing with these, stand those strongest injunctions 
to slaves, which are quoted so confidently in this discussion ; 
namely, those that recognize the greatest hardships of slavery. 
Thus when in 1 Tim. 6:1, the " yoke" of slavery is mentioned, 
for the sake of exhorting the slaves to bear it patiently, that 
passage surely enjoins patience, and obedience ; but it no 
mure approves that " harshest bondage" which we are told 
that expression describes, than did our Saviour approve the 
smiting upon one cheek, because he directed us to turn the 
other. One cannot but wonder and regret, that in a day like 
this, when slavery is so unscrupulous in its pretensions, such 
an expression should be quoted, with intensifying comment, 
as a divine warrant for slaveholding. — Again, the passage 
1 Pet. 2 : 18, while it bids the slaves take it patiently, when 



21 

they do well and suffer for it, goes on to compare such patient 
suffering to the very suffering of Christ. How monstrous to 
separate such a passage from its connection, and to strain it 
into a proof of the apostle's approbation of slavery. — Just so 
does St. Paul in 1 Cor. 7 : 21, bid Christian slaves be content- 
ed with their lot, since they may be acceptable to Christ whether 
slaves or freemen. What other counsel could he give a slave, 
to whom slavery was not a matter of choice, but of necessity ? 
So far as it might be subject to his choice, the apostle coun- 
selled him not to continue in it. " If thou mayest be free, use 
it rather." Expressions like these that we have been consider- 
ing, if they had filled the New Testament, would have recog- 
nized slavery indeed, but would no more have approved those fea- 
tures of it to which they referred, than would a book of directions 
for men who had fallen among thieves, be an apology for robbery. 
But it is evident, now, that a positive wrong may, under 
certain circumstances, furnish occasion for a course of action, 
as well as of mere suffering. In that case, the law that 
should define the necessary action, would in no degree coun- 
tenance the wrong itself. Thus the Gospel law of repentance 
presupposes sin, but surely does not excuse it ; and the law of 
restitution presupposes fraud, but does not excuse it. For the de- 
sign of the action enjoined in each case is not to perpetuate 
the wrong, but to cure it. Now it is plain that there are some 
wrongs, the cure of which may be both prompt and complete. 
For example, if one has stolen his neighbor's goods, he may re- 
store them, and if it be necessary, fourfold. There are other 
wrongs which it needs time to rectify, if they can be rectified at 
all. For example, if one has struck a blow in passion or malice, 
it may need the provision of the kindest medical attendance, 
and the lapse of months to restore the sufferer. And there 
is still a third class of wrongs, the cure of which demands not 
only time, but the maintenance of some of the forms of the 
wrong itself. Thus, if one has stolen a child, and carried him 
away, and then desires to return him ; the child, incredulous 
or impatient, may struggle upon his way to his father's house, 
just as he did in leaving it ; so that a mere observer would 
need to observe very closely, to decide that the man was not 



22 

kidnapping the child, even while he was restoring him. Just 
so, some unscrupulous man may have secured the person of a 
rival, with the design of holding him in prepetual imprison- 
ment ; a case which no reader of history will find it hard to 
imagine. After the lapse of months, or of years, the jailer 
may repent of the wrong ; but by that time the prisoner may 
be so enervated in mind and body, that sudden liberty would 
be his sure destruction. Under such circumstances, it becomes 
the duty of the repenting man to take his captive from his 
dungeon, to encourage him with the prospect of his speedy 
liberation, to divert and nourish him and prepare him for it. 
The former prisoner may submit to the process with cheerful- 
ness, or, eager, for liberty, he may seek it prematurely, and at 
the risk of his life. It then becomes the duty of the other to 
restrain him, till the restoration of his health, or the care of 
his friends, would secure him against the danger. Take an 
illustration somewhat different. A sea captain being about 
to sail from some island of the Pacific, may, by fraud or vio- 
lence, detain a youth of the island upon his vessel. Arrived 
at the next port, the youth may choose to escape. Has the 
other, if aware of his purpose, a right to yield to it ? Would 
liberty at Canton, be to the ignorant and helpless savage, a 
restoration of the liberty he had at New Zealand ? 

Now if a Christian teacher were called upon to express an 
abstract opinion upon any such act of kidnapping or lawless 
imprisonment, he must condemn it utterly. If, on the other 
hand, he should come in contact with one of those wrongs 
when it should be complete and at its very height, and 
then should undertake to counsel both the author and the 
subject of the violence, concerning their duty under the cir- 
cumstances, should he begin to clamor for nothing but lib- 
erty ? Nay, if the possessor of the stolen child should be 
about to give him liberty upon the highway, a hundred miles 
from his father's house, should not his instructor expressly con- 
demn the mischievous purpose ? And if, in so doing, he could 
be so thoughtless as to drop no word condemnatory of the ori- 
ginal wrong, could he be fairly quoted as having approved it ? 
In each of the instances supposed, the restraint, though the 



23 

same in form, undergoes, at a particular point, a change of its 
whole essence. Up to the moment when the author of the wrong 
seeks to repair it, the restraint is prompted by the grossest 
selfishness and injustice. From that moment forward, it may 
be prompted by the truest Christian benevolence. The first 
half is absolutely wrong ; the second half, the circumstances 
being presupposed, may be absolutely right : not, be it ob- 
served, by any claim which the perpetrator of the wrong has 
acquired by his lawless act, but by the simplest rules of 
Christian duty to the sufferer himself. In a word, there may be 
such sins against personal liberty, as rob a man not only of 
liberty, but of the conditions that fit him for it ; and the 
reparation for such sins must be double ; — first, of a fitness for 
liberty, and secondly, of liberty itself. 

Now if the enslavement of one class of men to another is 
a sin at all, it is a sin of this very kind. It has taken a 
race of men out of circumstances of freedom, which they 
were competent to meet ; and it has either destroyed that 
competency by actual degradation, or it has placed them in 
the midst of new circumstances, in which their competency 
cannot serve them. It differs from the instances enumerated 
chiefly in this — that its wrongs demand a longer process to 
cure them. A short-lived slavery of a single man might be 
relieved by reinstating him in his former position ; but the 
long-continued degradation of a race, with all the artificial 
social usages to which it has given rise, admits of no such 
summary process. Time has wrought the evil ; and time 
must cure it. Look, for example, at the slavery with which 
the apostles had to deal. It is a calculation more moderate 
than the learned have made, that there was at that day, 
throughout the Koman Empire, one slave for every freeman. 
It was common for single masters to be the owners of hun- 
dreds. We know that, in some instances, they were the 
owners of thousands. Among these multitudes, of course, 
every age and condition was represented. Some, indeed, 
were trained to such employments as quite prepared them 
for a state of freedom. Others discharged only such menial 
duties as left them without the skill, or character, or fore- 



24 

thought, that would fit them to provide for themselves ; — 
for slaves, according to Dr. Howe, (who hardly compliments 
.slavery by the statement,) "are ignorant, unprincipled, im- 
moral men." Added to these, there were the young, and 
the old, and the disabled. By what possibility, consistent 
with the plainest laws of Christian morality, could masters 
suddenly sunder such relations ? To disband the slaves 
would have been the grossest cruelty, at least to some of 
them. To sell them would only have been to shift the evil, 
and doubtless to increase it. To have manumitted those 
slaves who were competent to care for themselves, while it 
would by no means have put an end to slavery, would have 
thrown, perhaps, scores or hundreds of needy, helpless men 
upon the sole energies of the master, and thus have left them 
as really unprovided for beneath his roof, as they could have 
been among strangers. It would have been an act of the 
same grade of wisdom and morality with that of a captain 
of a leaking vessel, who should dismiss his hearty crew in 
the long-boat, and leave the passengers to perish, when the 
presence and industry of all could have saved the ship. 
Wealth upon the master's part, indeed, could have met such 
an emergency ; but such wealth is not the rule in any com- 
munity ; and therefore the only security which the slaves, as 
a body, could have against outright wretchedness, was the 
permanence of the household, for a long time to come, in the 
same essential form in which the Gospel found it. But to 
retain this form at all, there needed to be either the cheer- 
ful consent of the slaves themselves, or the power of con- 
si mint upon the part of the master. In either case, there 
would need to be service rendered ; and that for the advan- 
tage of the slaves themselves. To support them in indolence, 
would be most mischievous to them, even if it were not im- 
possible. We have a fair illustration of all the circumstances 
at our own door. What most earnest opposer of the system 
of American slavery, if he have any trace of wisdom and 
goodness in him, could go to-day to the Christian masters of 
the South, and advise them to disband their slaves ? What 
untold misery would follow the wicked procedure? Would 



25 

he venture to counsel the immediate emancipation of all who 
are well, and skilful, and prudent ? Surely most masters 
could make no such distinction with safety to the helpless slaves 
they should retain. And thus, even pity for the oppressed 
could venture upon no general rule for breaking their bonds. 

Under such circumstances, to demand that every opposer 
of the system of slavery should evince his opposition by a 
blind demand for emancipation, is an absurdity too gross to 
be measured. The slaveholding which the apostles found 
might be a sin. But there might be another slaveholding, 
under the common dictates of the Gospel of Christ, that 
should be the very cure and atonement for the first. And 
for that merciful slaveholding rules might be given. The 
very greatness of the former wrong demanded that they 
should be given. And when they are pronounced in the true 
spirit of Christ, are we to be told, in triumph, that they 
have endorsed the system ? Does this put the seal of their 
approbation upon the scenes of war and rapine, that alone 
gave that slavery a beginning ? Does this sanction the ex- 
isting notion that a slave is a chattel, and not a person ? 
Does this bid all future ages perpetuate the notion, and 
secure the subjects of it, by the same heathenish means ? 
In the discussion of this matter there is a disregard of the 
plainest distinctions, so common and so gross, that one can 
only wonder at it. The countenance of the apostles extended 
to the restraints of slavery, but not to the motives of it. 
It sustained its form, but there is not a hint of sustaining 
its principles. In a word, the apostles did, concerning 
slavery, by express injunction, just what the simple spirit of 
our religion would have done if they had not named it. 
And thus, we assert, as a matter of fact, that there is not 
a word of all the apostles' directions concerning slavery, that 
cannot be heartily repeated to-day to the Christian masters 
and slaves of the South, and that, by men who claim that 
the Gospel of Christ has taught them to hate the principles 
of slavery with a perfect hatred. 

Here follows a list of them all, not excepting that rebuke 
of seditious advisers, which the argument before us counts the 



26 

end of controversy. Let the candid reader take his New Testa- 
ment and read each passage carefully, and in its connection, 
1 Cor. 7 : 20-23. Eph. 6 : 5-9. Col. 3 : 21-25. Ch. 4 : 1. 
1 Tim. 6 : 1-3. The reader will observe that the expression 
"wholesome words, " &c. in the last quoted passage, has refer- 
ence to all the preceding instructions of the apostle, and not 
only to those in the immediate context, which refer to slavery. 
Tit. 2 : 9, 10. 1 Pet. 2 : 18-23. 

In perfect consistency with the principles that have been 
illustrated, and with the formal directions just quoted, stands 
the agency of the apostle Paul in regard to the return of 
Onesimus. The facts were these. Onesimus, a slave, having 
absconded from his Christian master at Colosse, came to 
Rome, and there, under the influence of St. Paul, became a 
Christian. The apostle, having entertained, for a moment, 
the thought of attaching him to his own person, decided rather 
to direct him to return to his master. The slave cheerfully 
consented ; and was dismissed with the letter well knoAvn as 
the Epistle to Philemon. In that letter is incorporated the 
following language, in explanation of the apostle's unwillingness 
to retain the slave. " Without thy mind would I do nothing ; 
that thy benefit should not be as it were of necessity, but 
willingly. " In that single passage, there is more of the sem- 
blance of approving the principles of slavery, than in all the 
New Testament besides ; for St. Paul calls the service which 
the absconded slave might render, the master's " benefit, " or 
kindness, and holds himself not justified in receiving it with- 
out the master's consent. Is there not here a recognition of 
just ownership ? Ownership of what ? Of the slave's per- 
son ? The apostle does not hint at such a thing ; and if 
Roman law is to fasten upon his words a meaning which 
they do not at all express, how shall we stop half way, 
and not make the apostle sanction the master's power over 
the life of his slave, as well as over his person ? The truth 
is, that just as much propriety as there may ever be in a mas- 
ter's holding a slave, just so much propriety is there in ac- 
knowledging his claim to the slave's service. Such a claim 
to service does St. Paul acknowledge, and nothing more. Will 



27 

any one explain how the denial of that claim could consist 
with any thing but immediate and universal emancipation ? 
If the apostle wished for that, it was a wild act to send One- 
simus back with such a letter. And* if he did not, it would 
have been as wild an act to retain him. — How far the apos- 
tle's regard of such a claim to service would have gone in in- 
clining him to return the person of a Christian slave, or of 
any other, into the power of a cruel Pagan master, this case 
does not give us the means of deciding. For one who recog- 
nizes even a father's authority over his son, would not be the 
instrument of returning every runaway son to his particular 
father. No candid man can read the Epistle to Philemon, 
and not be sure that the character of Philemon had more to 
do with the restoration of his slave, than his mere claim to 
his slave's obedience. — It is wonderful to see with what parade 
of trumpets and heralds this simple incident is marshalled out 
to do battle for slavery against all comers, while there is not a 
feature of it that the most consistent foe of slavery would 
not have been glad to adopt under the circumstances. 

Our object thus far has been to consider the evidence of 
the New Testament, not against slavery, but for it. And we 
have considered every particular passage which the friends of the 
system advance, as containing positive proof in its behalf. 
The evidence is all in, and it establishes this : That in a day 
when the half of men were slaves, the apostles spoke of sla- 
very : — That when the immediate abolition of slavery was pro- 
hibited by the plainest principles of the Gospel, and of common 
humanity, the apostles did not abolish it ; but still, that all 
their rules and acts concerning it, were such as the most hearty 
opposers of the system could have adopted without reserve. 
And therefore we insist, that the apostles gave no more ap- 
probation to slavery, than does any other legislator give to an 
established wrong which he legislates to cure. The whole so- 
cial system, as the apostles found it, was like a fool-hardy 
man that had sinned against some radical law of health, and 
was suffering for it. They were the wise physicians who 
adapted their regimen to the disease which it had, and not to 
the health which it had not ; the disease itself was no crime 
of theirs. 



28 

If any shall count this that we have given, a mere theory 
of the apostles' relations to slavery ; then it is theory against 
theory. And we are not called upon to establish ours, but 
the friends of slavery must establish theirs. For how stands 
the case ? The argument which we are reviewing has under- 
taken to prove that slaveholding is not sinful ; and has sum- 
moned the apostles as witnesses. Now if by the term "slave- 
holding" is intended the maintenance of such of the mere 
forms of slavery as common Gospel law forbade to be abol- 
ished — an interpretation of the term which the argument never 
hints at — then the position is established ; and we only regret 
that the terms of it were not made more definite. But if that 
word "slaveholding" was intended to include any ideas of a 
master's ownership in his slave, as it confessedly was, then we 
wait for the testimony. Let them elicit it. We take our 
stand upon that sound maxim of all philosophy, that a suffi- 
cient explanation of any fact is a final explanation. If there 
was an actual reason upon the very surface of the existing 
slavery, that satisfactorily accounts for every word and act of 
the apostles concerning it, let those who contend for a con- 
jectural reason in the heart of the system, make good their 
point. We explain the apostles' conduct by the undeniable ne- 
cessities of the case, common sense and the Gospel being judges. 
Let those who will have another explanation, find the facts to 
fit it. The existing facts are exhausted ; they cannot serve them. 

But we do not attempt to intrench ourselves behind any 
such dialectical right. If Ave have advanced a theory, we 
stand ready to prove it true. We have been insisting upon a 
distinction between the form and the principle of slavery; 
and we have also insisted that the apostles tolerated the one, 
under circumstances that enjoined it by the common princi- 
ples of the Gospel, and that would have made it a flagrant 
crime to abrogate it. We now undertake to prove that they 
distinctly condemned the other. If that point is made good, 
the relations of the New Testament to slavery, become as clear 
as noonday. 

The principle of slavery, according to modern definitions 
may be this or that, as suits the views of the definer. 



29 

We shall reach these views in their turn. But to judge 
of the apostles' actions, we must look at things from their 
position. The principle of slavery, in their day, was as 
clearly denned as any idea could possibly be. And it was 
this ; that the master was the absolute proprietor of the 
slave. This proprietorship embodied different prerogatives. 
The greatest was the right to take the slave's life. Under 
this there was the right to punish or torture him at the master's 
discretion ; the right to rob the slave of her virtue ; the right 
to exact a slave's involuntary and unremunerated labor ; the 
right to transfer him by sale. These were items more or less 
prominent in the monstrous idea. The sum was what has been 
already named, absolute proprietorship. That principle of 
slavery, be it observed, we extract not only from existing laws 
and customs, but from the terms which the apostles them- 
selves use. If these terms were intended by them to cover 
any principle of slavery at all — a thing which we utterly de- 
ny — there was no consideration of etymology or usage that 
could restrict them within their constant and recognized 
scope. The master was an absolute lord, and the slave was 
his property. Now it was possible for the apostles to do 
either of three things : to warrant that proprietorship to its 
full extent ; or to warrant some of its prerogatives ; or to con- 
demn it utterly. No one will claim that they took the first 
course. But it is insisted that they took the second ; and we 
insist that they took the last, and left master and slave stand- 
ing, not on any footing of abstract right and obligation, but 
of simple Gospel duty under the circumstances. 

In proof of this we do not present any sweeping law 
against slaveholding, or any rebuke of the believing centu- 
rion in the Gospel for holding slaves. And if any are deter- 
mined still to wonder why this sort of evidence is wanting, 
let them find a cause which such evidence would serve. For 
our part, we hold that a general condemnation of slaveholders 
would have been just one remove from a general condemna- 
tion of parents. The proof that we seek is not against slave- 
holding, but against the principle of slavery. 

Are we to look, then, for a formal definition of that principle, 



30 

with a law against it ? Such a definition, indeed, would have in- 
cluded no innocent masters ; the blow would have fallen just 
where it was deserved. Why was not such a definition given ? 
We have no answer to give but this ; that, in fact, the apostles 
met that very principle of absolute proprietorship in every ex- 
isting social relation, and gave it such a formal rebuke in no in- 
stance. 

It entered into the existing civil government. They expressly 
recognized the government, and did not condemn the despotism. 
Yet rulers were not too high a mark for the Gospel to reach. 

It entered into the marriage relation. By the Roman law 
the husband had power " to chastise " the wife according to 
his "judgment or caprice ; he exercised the jurisdiction of life 
and death, and it was allowed that in cases of adultery or 
drunkenness, the sentence might properly be inflicted." The 
woman was " so clearly defined, not as a person, but as a thing, 
that she might be claimed like other movables, by the posses- 
sion of an entire year." (Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Ch. 44.) 
By the same law, even " the adult son of a Roman citizen 
was, in his father's house, a mere thing, confounded by the law 
with the movables, the cattle, and the slaves, whom the 
capricious master might alienate or destroy without being re- 
sponsible to any earthly tribunal." The father's "oxen or 
children, if stolen, might be recovered by the same action of 
theft ; and if either had been guilty of a trespass, it was in his 
(the father's) own option to compensate the damage, or resign 
to the injured party the obnoxious animal. At the call of 
indigence or avarice, the master of a family could dispose of 
his children or slaves ; but the condition of the slave was far 
more advantageous, since he regained, by the first manu- 
mission, his alienated freedom ; but the son was again re- 
stored to his unnatural father. He might be condemned to 
servitude a second and a third time, and it was not till after 
the third sale and deliverance, that he was enfranchised from 
the domestic power that had been so repeatedly abused. 
The majesty of a parent was armed with the power of life and 
death." (Decline and Fall, Ch. 44.) If any one is startled 
by these details, and considers them almost incredible, let him 



31 

remember that he is less startled by the details of ancient 
slavery, not because they are less monstrous in themselves, but 
only because the discussion of the subject, and some of the ex- 
cesses of existing slavery, have made them more familiar. To the 
apostles they could not fail to be well known. The Roman law 
was then the law of the civilized world. Every church, to which an 
epistle was addressed, was under it. St. Paul himself, though 
born in Asia Minor, was a Roman citizen. — If the actual 
abuses, which grew out of such laws, were less numerous than 
those of slavery, let us consider that natural affection in some 
degree restrained them. They were not less real, nor less 
flagrant. Now, such absolute authority over wife or child 
was as vicious as absolute authority over a servant. But in 
neither case do we find it formally condemned. 

Men may explain this fact as they choose. Our own ex- 
planation is simply this : That any formal exposition of the 
social abuses then existing, would have attacked those abuses, 
not so much through the consciences of the oppressors, as 
through the passions of the oppressed. For the apostles to 
have furnished fuel for a general conflagration, would have 
been an act sanctioned by no principle of the Gospel, and would 
have barred effectually and justly the progress of the religion 
that admitted it. The Gospel had other means of attacking 
the existing evils, no less direct and honest, but safer, surer, 
and more speedy. These means the apostles used. If any man 
chooses to call this policy, he is welcome to his word. Such 
policy is the noblest exercise of an enlightened mind and con- 
science. It is right applied to circumstances. 

But we are concerned, not with the explanation, but with 
the fact itself. We have not made it ; but we find it. That 
fact compels all men who revere the Gospel to acknowledge 
that, in the apostles' regard, there must have been some suf- 
ficient way of condemning those notions of absolute power 
that then perverted every social relation, without resorting to 
a formal specification and rebuke. 

The end might be gained by means of the general laws of 
the Gospel. In some of the particulars enumerated, it must 
have been gained through them, or not at all. Fathers are no- 
where formally forbidden to sell their sons into slavery, nor hus- 



32 

bands to chastise their refractory wives. Yet such customs 
are held to be clearly condemned by the Gospel, even while 
it enjoins obedience upon both wives and sons, and recognizes 
the authority of husbands and fathers. Nay, the friends of 
slavery, who acknowledge the enormity of some of its fea- 
tures in the apostles' day, cannot find a formal mention 
and rebuke of those very enormities. A master is nowhere 
told, in so many words, that he has no right to kill his slaves, 
or to deny to them the marriage relation, or to make a cruel 
separation of parents and children. But this lack is thought 
to be easily supplied. For we are reminded that "the Bible 
condemns all injustice, cruelty, oppression, and violence." 
(Princeton Eeview, Art. Slavery, 1836.) But now that the 
gates are lifted, and the tide of the Gospel is let in upon the 
prerogatives of the master, how shall the stream be shut off 
again ? The relations which God has established by uni- 
versal law may welcome even a flood, which, however it may 
sweep away the wicked products of man's device, can never 
touch the everlasting hills. But how shall the principles of 
slavery survive the shock ? The learned and candid writer 
of the article just now referred to, considers that he has 
answered the question. He maintains that there is an essence 
of slavery which the general laws of the Gospel cannot touch, 
and he thus defines it : " The deprivation of personal liberty, 
obligation of service at the discretion of another, and the 
transferable character of the authority and claim of service 
of the master." He quotes, besides, with apparent appro- 
bation, the definition of Paley : "I define slavery to be an 
obligation to labor for the benefit of the master, without the 
contract or consent of the servant." 

But now, one of two things is true. Slavery, as above de- 
fined, either has the full consent and approbation of the 
general laws of the Gospel, or it has not. If it has, its 
friends are treating it most unfairly in going about to prove 
that it only "is not sinful." Who ever heard of an argu- 
ment among reasonable men to prove that marriage or civil 
government is not sinful ? The very form of the plea, and 
of the particular arguments that are urged to support it, 



33 

confesses, what all disinterested Christendom maintains, that 
the spirit of the Gospel is averse to a relation, which obliges 
a servant to labor involuntarily " at the discretion of the 
master," or " for the master's benefit." Then we demand, 
upon what ground is the master's prerogative to exact such 
service, sheltered from the condemnation of the Gospel ? It 
will not be enough to answer, in the language of the re- 
viewer already quoted, that the apostles did not command 
the masters to set their slaves free. We are discussing, not 
the fact of bondage, but the principle of it — its strict rela- 
tions to the master's rights ; and, we ask, how is one to dis- 
criminate so nicely between the right of a man to punish 
another at Ins own caprice, and the right to extort service 
from another for his own advantage ? What so great differ- 
ence does it make, whether the pain to be inflicted " at the 
master's discretion" is in the skin that has been wounded 
with the lash, or in the muscles that have been worn with 
toil, or in the mind that revolts from the irksome and hope- 
less task? For labor, as distinguished from cheerful in- 
dustry, is one most prominent element of the curse upon sin. 
It is pain, as much as any pain. What right has a man, 
arbitrarily, to assign to a fellow-man that dispensation of 
God's justice more than any other ? We are told that other 
forms of pain, besides that of involuntary labor, are not 
essential to " slavery," and therefore are condemned in gene- 
ral laws. But what is this modern abstraction of " slavery " 
that presumes to dictate to the Gospel ? What is this, with 
its notions of " the master's benefit " and " the transfer of 
claims," that it should stand up against the simplest law of 
Christ ? The apostles never heard of such a thing ; they 
never uttered a sentence, or a word, out of which the arbi- 
trary notion could define itself. " Master " and " slave," in 
their day, so far as they defined any principle at all, were 
the symbols of absolute power and absolute submission. 
But the apostles used the words in no such sense. They 
took them as the farniliar designation of an actual relation, 
for which they made rules, so far from any recognition of the 
conventional authority, that thousands of shrewd but un~ 
3 



34 

learned men have studied them, and lived by them, and 
never thought of slavery. Show us the barrier which the 
apostles have erected around the master's prerogative. Show 
us that sacred corner of the domain of despotism, which 
they have forbidden the Gospel to invade. And the evi- 
dence must be, not in the toleration of forms which could 
not suddenly be changed, nor in the recognition of such 
authority as the very forms implied ; but in rights that were 
independent of existing circumstances, and might stand for 
ever. Till that evidence is produced, let the Gospel do its 
perfect work. Never fear it. There is no mischief in it. 
The laws of Christ will never mistake a show of justice, or 
of love, for the essence. Give them all their scope. God's 
blessing on what they bless ; there is no blessing on what 
they forbid. The terms of their decision shall vary with the 
circumstances, but the principles are fixed and can never 
change. There were times, indeed, when God suspended his 
general laws of human love and justice, and made men the 
direct ministers of his vengeance ; and then a special reve- 
lation defined the temporary exception. But he held back 
his Gospel till the fulness of time, that it might be a per- 
fect law for every age and every place. The cause that is 
arraigned before that law, has reached the highest court ; 
there is no appeal from its decision, unless God shall speak 
from heaven. When that law was announced, every prin- 
ciple of absolute power received its death-blow ; and one 
rule took the place of all conventional right. It did not 
unmake facts, but principles. If a slave was dependent and 
vicious, no announcement of a law of love could suddenly 
change him ; and while it did not, that very law enjoined 
the kind of care and control which his case demanded. But 
a master's right to compel involuntary labor, and for his 
own benefit, is a principle ; and it is the very province of the 
Gospel to condemn it, If principles like that had been in- 
tended to endure, there would have been no Gospel. All the 
reasoning in the world cannot avoid this issue. All the con- 
ventional names of tyranny that ever were uttered might 
have concentrated themselves in one, and the apostles might 



35 

have had need to use it ; but their lips would have been to 
it like a refiner's fire. It might have stood thereafter for a 
symbol of facts, but not of principles. The Gospel would 
have pronounced upon it. 

And now, what form of authority is this, that ventures 
to expostulate against this universal law ? Not that of civil 
government, or of the family, which derives itself from God's 
appointment ; but that of slavery, which, at the most, was 
only recognized. So many more prerogatives has that rela- 
tion, which traces back its heathen origin to violence and 
wrong, than that which is established by the sanction of 
God. 

The fallacy is transparent ; and, if it were not, its friends 
would make it so. For their inconsistent efforts to define 
the master's prerogative, confess that they themselves can- 
not decide, where the Gospel's inroads upon it were arrested. 
So important a matter as the right to sell the slave, is 
admitted into one definition and excluded from another. 
Have the apostles protected that ? and where ? Are there 
any limitations to that right, if it exists, and if so, what 
defines them ? Besides, the so-called definitions, even where 
they agree, leave so much undefined, that the idea is quite 
inconrplete. There is " obligation of service," and no speci- 
fied right of enforcing the service ; and, if that is implied, 
what means of compulsion may the right employ, and what 
measure of compulsion when the means do not easily suc- 
ceed 1 Is all this a question of right, or a question of Gospel 
duty ? and, if of both, what becomes of the definition of re- 
served prerogatives 1 A father could have no difficulty here, 
nor could the master of an apprentice, for each of these 
trace their rights, not beyond the G-ospel, but to it— not to 
some obligation of the apprentice ; or child to labor "for the 
benefit " of Iris superior ; but to an obligation that binds both 
parties, to act for the greatest advantage of both. The 
common Gospel law controls the whole ; but who shall toll 
how a man should act in a relation half merciful and half 
selfish, based upon absolute right, and yet compelled to con- 
form to the rules of love 1 No human ethics can define the 



36 

incongruous compound. Again, neither of the definitions we 
have quoted speaks one word of recompense of any form ; are 
we to understand that remuneration is excluded from the 
essence of slavery ? Have the apostles carefully prohibited 
it? Or if it may enter, is it by permission, or bylaw? 
Has the slave a right to it? And if so, to how much? 
What defines the measure of the uncovenanted justice? 
Prerogative or the Gospel ? So, too, of mental and religious 
training. Has the master a right to withhold either, and if 
not, how much must he render ? If the Gospel has a voice 
in all these questions, will it not, at length, trench somewhat 
seriously upon the master's right to exact service "for his 
benefit ?" The definitions need to be defined again, and any 
heart, with the love of Christ in it, that attempts the task, 
however it may have blinded itself at first with abstract 
terms and preconceived opinions, will wear upon the sharp 
and cold prerogative until it melts away like ice before the 
sun. The result is sure, and there is no help for it. So 
much of the despotism of the apostles' day, whether of 
rulers, or parents, or husbands, or masters, as can stand be- 
fore the spirit of the Gospel, may stand for ever, and so much 
as cannot survive that fair encounter, has met its doom. No 
logic can quicken it. 

But we take higher ground than this. The apostles have 
not sent us up and down the Gospel, to gather an estimate of 
slavery. If they had foreseen this very abstraction of " slavery " 
that seeks to find countenance from their words, they could not 
have disclaimed the imputation more pointedly than they did. 
It is to be observed, that whatever formal limitations of the 
pretended rights of masters the apostles might make, are to be 
looked for, not in their addresses to the slaves, but only in 
their instructions to the masters themselves. The former suf- 
fered the wrong, and could not control it ; the power was with 
the latter. It is remarkable, now, that the whole New Testa- 
ment, which is so confidently quoted as having approved sla- 
very without ever condemning it, contains but two isolated 
passages of instructions to masters. Neither of these is in- 
tended to confer power ; both of them limit it. The phrase- 



37 

ology, indeed, is not adapted to inflame the passions of the slaves, 
but yet it is so distinct in its condemnation of the essence of 
slavery, that the most restricted definition of it cannot stand 
before either passage for a moment. 

The first of these is: Col. 4: 1. — "Masters, give unto 
your slaves that which is just and equal, knowing that ye also 
have a master in heaven." No man can doubt that these 
words were intended to assail the common injustice and cruelty 
which entered into the treatment of slaves ; together with 
that idea of the master's authority, out of which such treat- 
ment grew. It is to be observed, that the apostle aimed to 
correct the evil by enpining, not kindness, as he might upon the 
owner of property, but justice and equity as upon the master 
of a man. The words are worth noticing. The first word 
"just" is the same that is used twice in the parable of the 
laborers in the vineyard, Matt. 20. " Whatever is right I will 
give you ; " where the idea is of just remuneration for work 
done. And the word, wherever used, never loses its primary 
idea of justice. The other word is a noun, literally meaning 
"equality," and is used but three times, in the New Testament. 
The other two instances are in 2 Cor. 8, 14. " For I mean not 
(v. 13) that other men be eased and you burdened ; but by 
an equality, that now at this time your abundance may be a 
supply for their want, that their abundance may be a supply 
for your want, that there may be an equality." The word 
then covers the idea of an exact proportion between two things ; 
in the passage in Cor., between the gifts of one church at one 
time, and of another church at another ; in the passages be- 
fore us, between the "giving" of the master and the sacri- 
fices of the slave. That we may not seem to be relying too 
confidently upon the meaning of a word so seldom employed, 
take the following example, of the meaning of the adjectives 
from which the noun in question is derived. In that parable 
in Matt, already quoted, some of the laborers complain in re- 
gard to the rest, " Thou hast made them equal to us which 
have borne," &c. In Luke 6, 34, lenders are spoken of who ex- 
pect " to receive as much again." There are no other instances 
of the use of the word, in which this idea of exact equality is 



38 

in the least degree lost. By the use of such terms, we insist, 
the apostle attacked directly the idea of a master's right to 
extort from the slave any services for which the slave should 
not receive, in some form, a full equivalent. If there is an 
error in this interpretation, it must be here ; that we regard 
the apostle as speaking of absolute justice and equal dealing ; 
whereas, he was speaking of what it was fit and proper a slave 
should receive. To this we will not answer that he spoke 
without qualification, and that he placed the two parties before 
God as their judge. But we will adopt the phraseology 
proposed. Little change will it make in the meaning of the 
verse, for fitness is not opposed to justice, nor distinct from it ; 
but is justice itself, adapted to circumstances. Thus, an em- 
ployer may receive service from a journeyman and from an ap- 
prentice. It is just, that he reward them both. It is fitting, 
that he reward the apprentice by instruction and general care, 
and the journeyman with wages. No man can describe any 
relation, permanent or contingent, in which, under the law 
of God, any act can be counted fit and proper, that is not es- 
sentially just. Circumstances may vary ; and that is only a 
pretended justice that does not make a full account of them. 
But when they have all been estimated, and the fitting course 
of action has been defined, it is absolute justice that pro- 
nounces the verdict. No government is entitled to a tittle of 
the goods or service of its subject upon any other score than 
that of a just remuneration ; though it may be fitting, that the 
remuneration shall take, this form, or that. The same is true 
of husband and wife, of parents and children, and of the 
parties in every conceivable, honest relation. Fitness may, 
in every case, decide the shape which the reciprocal justice is to 
assume, it can never impair the amount of it. In truth, there 
is only one conceivable instance in which what is just or proper 
or fit, can tend to any thing less than the true advantage of 
him to whom it is rendered ; and that is the case of a criminal 
to whom justice is punishment ; and even then, so fir as the 
punishment is remedial, the justice is beneficent. Nay, the 
very pain of his exemplary punishment lias been compensated 
in the security which he has previously enjoyed, under the 



39 

very law that inflicts it.* Why shall a slave be put clown, 
not to the level of a criminal, but beneath it, as Dr. How 
needs to do, in his strained analogy between a master and a 
judge ? Why should the master of an innocent man be en- 
titled to do " at his discretion," what the highest judge of the 
land, with all the authority of civil and divine law to back 
him, cannot do to the vilest criminal ; namely, impose in the 
name of justice, restrictions and pains deserved by no fault of 
the sufferer, and in no way tending to his advantage ? The 
thing is monstrous. It is a solecism in morals. It is an in- 
novation in language even. Let those Christian reasoners, 
who suffer themselves to hold that, in slavery, justice or fit- 
ness is entitled not only to decide the form of the slave's re- 
muneration, but to limit the amount of it, show a warrant 
for the pretence. The exception, if it exist, is a broad one. 
Let us have it defined in fair, plain terms. A cloudy argu- 
ment from the sufferance of a mere form, when the very jus- 
tice that is impugned demanded the preservation of that form, 
will not meet the necessity. We need proof as strong as the 
proof of a miracle ; and stronger ; for God has often suspended, 
for a while, the laws of nature ; but this claims a perpetual 
perversion of his law of morals. Such a case is unheard of, 
and many men will refuse to believe in it upon any testimony. 
Till the conclusive proof is brought, the clear words of the 
apostle, the analogy of our religion, and the very character of 
God, demand for slaves as for other men, what is absolutely 
just and equal. Such a demand upon the apostle's lips, did 
not require that the unprovided slave should be dismissed to 
freedom, and destruction ; it was the very province of justice 
to forbid such an act. It had no reference to some sudden 
system of wages. While it bound the conscience of the mas- 

* " The Lawfulness of putting <a malefactor to death arises from this ; the 
law by which he is punished, was made for his security. A murderer for in- 
stance, has enjoyed the benefit of the very law which condemns him ; it has 
been a continual protection to him ; he cannot therefore object against it. Bu t 
it is not so with the slave. The law of slavery can never be beneficial to him ; 
it is in all cases against him. without ever being for his advantage, and there- 
fore this law is contrary to the fundamental principles of all societies/'— Mon. 
squicu. Spirit oj Laws, Book lo, Chapter 2. 



40 

tcr to its absolute rule, it could not but leave him a large dis- 
cretion in applying tbe rule. But it was to be justice still. 
Under such, a rule, the true advantage of the slave counts just 
as much as the true advantage of the master. There are no 
superior rights for the latter to throw into his scale for a 
make-weight. In any real or apparent collision between the 
interests of the two, the difficulty is to be resolved, not by the 
power of the strongest, but by justice to be rendered in 
the sight of God. There is only one way, in which a system 
of slavery can maintain its essence in the face of such a rule ; 
and that is by proving its express divine warrant. Mosaic 
slavery would never have been disturbed by it ; but Roman 
slavery could hardly hold out so well. The whole heart of 
that unauthorized system was taken out of it by that single text. 
The other passage referred to, is in Eph. 6 : 9, where the 
apostle having exhorted slaves to act toward their masters 
" as unto Christ " and " as to the Lord, " " doing the will of God 
from the heart, " and anticipating a just judgment, adds, " and 
ye masters do the same things unto them, forbearing threat- 
ening, knowing that your master also is in Heaven, neither 
is there any respect of persons with him. " The Greek phrase 
for ' respect of persons ' is an exact translation of a Hebrew 
phrase, very common in the Old Testament. The origin of 
it, is thought to have been in the habit of kings to receive 
with complaisance such suitors as brought them presents ; 
but whatever may have been its origin and occasional use, it 
was the current phrase with the Old Testament writers for 
describing partiality upon the part of a judge. Thus in Lev. 
19 : 15, it is said : " Thou shalt do no unrighteousness in 
judgment, thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor 
honor the person of the rich ; " where the meaning evidently 
is, that the cause of the poorest or of the richest is to be 
decided equally by absolute justice. In Deut. 10 : 17, 18, 
the expression is associated with the name of God. " For 
the Lord your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great 
God, a mighty and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, 
nor taketh reward. lie doth execute the judgment of the 
fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger in giving him 



41 

food and raiment." In Job 34 : 19, God is again described 
as one that " accepteth not the persons of princes norregard- 
eth the rich more than the poor, for they are all the work of 
his hands." The phrase is common in the New Testament, 
and retains the same intrinsic idea of partiality at the expense 
of justice or truth. But the passages quoted from the Old 
Testament are more exactly parallel with that before us, 
since they speak of God in his character of judge, and remind 
men in a position of power, that he will deal with them, and 
the subjects of their power, by the rules of an exact justice. 

The words can have no other meaning here ; for St. Paul 
at least intended to teach the masters whom he addressed 
that, in some particular, God, in the final judgment, would 
set them upon a level with their slaves. He could not have 
referred to the mere fact of judgment, for no Christian mas- 
ter needed to be told so solemnly that both he, and his slave 
should, in fact, be judged. Then he must have referred to 
the principles upon which the judgment should proceed ; and 
these are nothing less than justice, embodied in God's standing 
law. Now, there was at that time an assumption of preroga- 
tive upon the part of masters, well known to all men, to 
which this language of the apostle most naturally opposed 
itself. And, if silence is so mighty an argument, let it this 
time serve the cause of mercy. We look for some reservation 
— some saving clause — some little remnant of the factitious 
authority that may survive the general overthrow. But not 
a word. The apostle batters the very principle of slavery, 
but provides no defender for it. He deals the destructive blow, 
but lifts no hand to sustain a beam of the tottering fabric. 
The whole superstructure of the master's prerogative fell to- 
g-ether. The external relation was intended to remain. For 
under the circumstances justice approved it. The language 
assaults nothing but a principle, like that of slavery. Parent 
and child, ruler and subject, may stand before the impartial 
Judge with equal acceptance. The rich man, or the strong 
man, who has used his wealth, or his strength, for the glory of 
God, and the welfare of men, may share in a blessing with 
the meek of the earth. The conscientious master who has 



42 

sought to fulfil to the ignorant and degraded victims of past 
oppression, the perfect law of love, may meet the very com- 
mendation of him who remembers the benefactor of the least 
of his brethren. But the man who employs a master's pre- 
rogative in wilfully abating God's common law of love and 
justice, if he has hope for that day, must stand alone. He 
lives and must be judged by a special law. That God, who 
is no respecter of persons, must respect him beyond all men, 
or he shall surely be condemned. 

But the testimony of the apostles may grow plainer. 
Surely it would, if we could follow them in their intercourse 
with particular masters, and know the spirit of those daily 
instructions, in which they adapted general laws to specific 
cases. But the detailed history that might furnish this infor- 
mation is wanting, and there is just one instance in the whole 
New Testament in which an apostle gives a slaveholder direct 
advice concerning his slaveholding ; and that is the case of 
Philemon already referred to. There are two features in that 
case ; the agency of the apostle in the return of Onesimus ; 
and the instructions given to his master in regard to his 
reception, and subsequent treatment. We have already 
noticed the first of these ; let us now notice the second. The 
terms of those instructions are sufficiently striking. " Thou 
therefore receive him, that is my own bowels." (v. 12.) No 
reader of the Bible needs to be told that in its figurative lan- 
guage, "the bowels" represented the seat of the gentler affec- 
tions, and thus those affections themselves; just as " the heart " 
does in ours, and that this appeal must have sounded in the ear 
of Philemon just as it would sound in ours, if the latter ex- 
pression were substituted for the former. — " For perhaps he 
therefore departed for a season, that thou shouldest receive 
him for ever ; not now as a slave, but above a slave, a brother 
beloved, especially to me, but how much more unto thee, 
both in the flesh, and in the Lord." (vs. 15, 16.) The brotherly 
affection which these expressions enjoin, might possibly, by a 
perversion of the apostle's meaning, have been limited to 
some intangible religious emotion, quite dissociated from a 
direct interest in the personal welfare of Onesimus ; and to 



43 

forestall that gross mistake, the words are added " both in 
the flesh, and in the Lord." — Again, we have this significant 
language. " If thou count me therefore a partner, receive him 
as myself." (v. 17.) The word " partner," though a strict 
translation of the original expression, does not immediately 
suggest its full meaning. Partners in business or pleasure 
were thrown much into each other's company, and so partner 
came to mean companion. This meaning of the word will not 
he questioned ; and the absolute use which is made of it here, 
requires that signification. The reference in that case, 
however, is to religious fellowship, and thus the apostle 
makes his own true Christian equality with Philemon, de- 
scribe the reception and permanent treatment which he de- 
manded for Onesimus. Now no reasonable and candid man 
can refuse to admit that all these were the expressions of 
warm feeling, and therefore are not to be pressed to their 
most extensive meaning. The future life of Onesimus was 
not intended to be that of a pet, who should have the free- 
dom of Philemon's mansion, and a right to its comforts, with 
no work to do ; but the expressions surely meant something, 
and the contrast in which the apostle placed them, plainly 
showed how much they meant. " Not now as a slave, but 
above a slave, a brother beloved, etc." It was clearly the design 
of the apostle Paul to relieve Onesimus from just so much of 
slavery, as was inconsistent with a regard of his character and 
person, identical with that which was due to the apostle 
himself. Such a rule would not interfere with the mere form 
of slaveholding. If the object of all this true sympathy, 
needed or chose, for any sufficient reason, to bind himself to 
the person or household of a master, and to serve him, such a 
relation might be consistent with the highest Christian re- 
gard and the most affectionate interest. But no man, who 
for his own advantage, restricts another's liberty, and com- 
pels his services, can by any ingenuity bring his conduct into 
harmony with these expressions. 

The friends of slavery insist upon the apostle's agency 
in returning Onesimus, as a rule to be followed. With 
infinitely greater justice do we insist upon his counsel to 



44 

Philemon, as a rule. For the return of a slave to such a 
master, and under the circumstances which then existed, 
was surely something less than a declaration that the 
apostle would send back any slave, to any master, at 
any time ; and therefore as we have seen already, fell far 
short of an unequivocal approval of slavery. But will any 
one tell us how it came to pass, if slavery in itself was just 
and proper, that such a slave as Onesimus was made the 
subject of such an interference ? If this case was the ex- 
ception, then where was the rule, and on what ground was 
the exception made ? So much as this is evident. 

1. The apostle did not write as he did, from mere solici- 
tude lest the returning slave should be punished for his fault. 
To that risk he alludes in verses that are complete in them- 
selves, and which we have not, as yet, quoted. " If he hath 
wronged thee, or oweth thee aught, put that on mine account. 
I, Paul, have written it with mine own hand, I will repay it. 
Albeit, I do not say to thee, how thou owest unto me, even 
thine own self besides." (vs. 18, 19.) More than this, the 
rule which he gave, was not for the mere reception of Onesi- 
mus, but for "receiving him for ever" (ulcovlov) ; "no longer 
(ovKerc) as a slave, but above a slave." And to this strong 
language, the apostle added the expression of his confidence 
that Philemon would even exceed the terms of his request. 
" Knowing that thou wilt also do more than I say." (v. 21.) 
Does this establishment of Onesimus " forever," upon a foot- 
ing above a slave, with this anticipation of some greater ben- 
efit for him, which even the significant terms employed had 
not described, warrant the representation that is given in the 
argument we are reviewing, of Paul, in awe of Philemon's 
" rights" and in fear of the "excesses of his passion and re- 
sentment, " " using entreaties " " for his poor runaway slave, 
Onesimus ? " and is not that argument somewhat beside the 
evidence, when it ventures to assert, that Onesimus after his 
return, was "a better slave?" Is the author quite sure 
that that undefined act at which the apostle hints, was not 
intended to be the earliest proper enfranchisement of the 
" brother beloved ? " 



45 

2. There was nothing in the character of Philemon to 
demand from the apostle a sp:cial care to soften the exces- 
sive rigors of his slaveholding. There are no terms of kind 
regard, and hearty Christian commendation, that can exceed 
those which the apostle addresses to this good man. Let 
one read the Epistle, and he cannot but be struck with them. 

3. There was nothing in the accomplishments of Onesi- 
mus, that made him more than another, a candidate for in- 
dulgence. He was not only a slave, but a slave in a menial 
position. He was not a merchant, or a mechanic, or an artist, 
but he was a house-servant. (See the note at the end of the 
Epistle.) If he had remained at Eome, he would have been 
a body-servant of Paul. There is no hint that he was to be 
employed by Philemon in any higher capacity. 

One thing only was there to distinguish him. He was 
a Christian, converted under the apostle's influence, and so, 
by a figure which the apostle commonly applied to such 
converts, he was called his "son." As for that exemplary 
temper and conduct, of which the argument before us speaks, 
the Epistle gives us no hint of it. So far as we can know, he 
stood in the regard of Paul, upon the very same footing with 
any other slaves who might have been converted by his in- 
strumentality. True, he had absconded from his master, and 
others had not ; but that could scarcely be counted a title to 
distinguished kindness. And therefore we ask ; What rea- 
son can be imagined why every word of the apostle in regard 
to him, should not apply equally to every Christian slave of 
a Christian master ? Nay, how far should these Christian 
distinctions limit the word 1 for the rule of the apostle is, 
" As ye have opportunity, do good unto all men." If the 
" household of faith " has a special claim to kindness, all the 
rest have claim enough. 

Those who may oppose this view, and insist upon the 
limitation of the apostle's counsel to the particular case of 
Onesimus, have a strange account to give of an Epistle that 
has found its place in the canon of the New Testament. It 
must have been the product of a sudden impulse of kindness 
toward a single man, embodying no general principle, estab- 



46 

listing no standing rule ; with that one sacred exception, 
thai a runaway slave is to be sent back to his master. In- 
spiration for once was mere blind sympathy, and constrained 
a tender-hearted apostle to modify for one particular slave, a 
relation which, under another kind of inspiration, he had ap- 
proved for thousands. Then how many acts under God's im- 
mediate suggestion, does it need to establish a principle ? We 
consider, that when the essential circumstances are the same, 
one example from God is final, and demands universal imita- 
tion. 

It is possible, now, to think of only one plausible reason 
for refusing to these expressions -the extended scope which we 
claim for them, and that is this : That if the constant advice, 
which the apostles were accustomed to give to Christian 
masters concerning their slaveholding, had been of this same 
tenor, there would have been no need for St. Paul to insist 
upon that advice in this letter ; or, to state the objection 
most strongly ; Does not the very exhortation to receive 
Onesimus " not as a slave," imply that he had absconded as a 
slave, and thus exclude the possibility of any habitual and 
formal interference upon the apostle's part even with the 
principle of slavery ? To this we reply, that however fully 
and distinctly St. Paul, or his brethren, might have condemn- 
ed the principle of slavery, such an act as the returning of 
Onesimus, though the exigencies of the times demanded and 
justified it, might be thoughtlessly taken as a retraction of 
that condemnation and an indorsement, not only of the ne- 
cessity of slaveholding, but of the master's prerogative. How 
many have so regarded the act, needs not be said. It is not 
fair, then, where the repetition of certain truths w T as clearly 
demanded, to make such repetition a proof that they had not 
been uttered before. Upon the supposition that the whole 
substance of this Epistle had been heard by Philemon again and 
again, and fairly acted upon, how could a single word of it have 
been spared, since, even in spite of its emphasis, so many hold 
its meaning to be equivocal ? But, in truth, we do not doubt, 
that this very Epistle did contain a clearer distinction be- 
tween the master's mere authority and his prerogative, than 



47 

Philemon had been accustomed to hear. One chief design of 
the whole Bible is to reduce general rules to such detail as 
may explain them to the Church in every age. And it is no 
fair objection to a distinct definition of a particular duty, to 
wonder why the whole was not clearly understood before. 
The Gospel was new. Men's thoughts were formed upon 
the model of heathenism. It needed line upon line, and 
the whole Bible is to reduce general rules to such detail as 
precept upon precept. And the Epistle to Philemon did 
not come so late in the church's history, that all the limits of 
truth and duty, must be supposed to- have been settled in 
men's minds before it. If they had been, it would never 
have been written. The Bible is not filled with rubbish ; it is 
meant to teach something. And thus, we have no difficulty 
in admitting, that though the general Gospel had defined 
the matter, Philemon, before the reception of this Epistle, 
might not quite have understood it. If he, and all men, have 
not understood it since, it is not the apostle's fault. 

And now we insist, as before, that of all the New Testa- 
ment, these three directions to masters are the only expres- 
sions that did, or by possibility could, recognize the principle 
of a master's prerogative, either to condemn it or approve it. 
There was no didactic description of slavery. Such a thing, 
indeed, might have resolved all doubts. But there were only 
these three addresses to masters, and perhaps twice as many 
addresses to slaves. The latter recognized authority, and 
enjoined obedience. We admit it cheerfully. But with what 
propriety would the basis, and nature, and limits of that au- 
thority come into discussion with those who neither created 
it, nor exerted it, nor could possibly resist it 1 If it rested 
upon this principle, and not upon that ; if these were its 
limits, and such were its excesses, was an address to slaves to 
incorporate such a homily ? Upon the other hand, is it 
not a fact, that the apostle Peter, in addressing slaves, re- 
cognized the irresponsible power that might inflict the most 
unjust punishments, and, though he indirectly condemned the 
injustice, said not a word to limit such power, and even en- 
joined submission to the whole 1 Does this sound like a thesis 



48 

upon the divine rights of slaveholders 1 A similar question 
may be asked concerning that other address to slaves, which 
presupposes an abuse of the master's power in the imposi- 
tion of the "yoke" of slavery. 1 Tim. 6. 1. But turn to those 
other expressions. Now those who hold the power are receiv- 
ing instruction. Now you may expect analysis and distinc- 
tions — not of human ethics, indeed, but of God's truth, which 
measures the terms of his commands as carefully as those of 
his doctrines. In every one of them you have authority, the 
very counterpart of the slave's obedience. In every one of 
them, too, you have restrictions which bind down that authori- 
ty, by the very terms, and to the very limits of Gospel love 
and justice. Here is the fountain of a master's power, where 
God has fixed it. And now the stream may rise as high as 
it can. Let it flow, and it shall carry blessing. It shall 

" follow the valley's playful windings, 
Curve round the cornfield and the hill of vines, 
Honoring the holy bounds of property." 

But if there are any dark waves that cover the lowliest terri- 
tory of human hope and happiness, they have issued from 
some other source. 

If these passages cannot bear the obvious interpretation 
which we have put upon them, some mischievous fatality 
must forbid that Gospel, which befriends all other men, to 
befriend the slave. We quote its standing laws in his be- 
half, and they cannot serve him ; for they are too general. 
We quote the only particular laws that could assail the mas- 
ter's prerogative, and find in them the most direct and forci- 
ble language that tongue can use ; and now the words are 
too direct, and it cannot be they were intended to mean so 
much. It cannot be that the apostle demands "justice and 
equal dealing," in the natural meaning of the words, or insists 
upon the master's and slave's absolute equality of right in the 
sight of God, or enjoins every Christian master of a Christian 
slave to count him " not a slave, but above a slave." Why 
not ? Would such a meaning clash with any other expressions 
of the Epistles ? Not at all. Can the words bear any other 
intelligible meaning? We cannot discover it. Would the 



49 

meaning, upon which we insist, harm any one 1 No ; we 
have put it at the very level of the Gospel. While others 
are insisting upon just one exception to God's universal law 
of justice, and making our religion a patchwork, we are in- 
sisting that it is " without seam, woven from the top through- 
out." General terms and particular, all rank themselves on 
our side. Upon the other, not a word of the whole New 
Testament ; there only stands between us, a fact of slavery, 
which the Gospel could not unmake, and the necessary form 
of which, the Gospel changed from a curse into a blessing. And 
if that necessary fact has such a subtle power as to enervate 
every law that is uttered, not against it, but against the 
monstrous principle that used to lurk within it ; alas for 
the slave ! The apostles did their best to serve him ; they 
uttered strong words ; but sin had barricaded itself behind its 
deeds, and they could not reach it ; — a strange weakness for 
that Gospel which God appointed to be a discerner of the 
thoughts and intents of the heart. 

Here, it would seem, the evidence must end ; for we have 
confessed that the addresses to the slaves might be expected 
to be silent upon the principles of slavery. But, in fact, utter 
silence was quite impossible. For how should one enjoin pa- 
tience, and not recognize the trial that demanded it ? For 
example, how would the sympathizing and cheering expres- 
sion " care not for it/' sound in an address to the subject of 
any authority that was lawful in itself, and intended to be 
permanent ? Conceive of another similar expression ad- 
dressed to children or wives, coupled with counsel to embrace 
the first lawful opportunity to sunder the existing relations. 
Again, how could a man, with a Christian heart in his bosom, 
speak of a " yoke" imposed by human hands, and not condemn 
them for their guilty service ? How could the helpless sub- 
jects of oppression be pointed for comfort and courage to the 
example of him, who, " when he was reviled, reviled not 
again, when he was rebuked, threatened not," and the means 
of their oppression, still be approved ? All these expressions 
of sympathy, indeed, concern the slaves, not of Christian mas- 
ers, but of others ; and, therefore, may be said to refer to 
4 



50 

an abuse of the master's prerogative. But had the apostles 
no sentiment concerning the prerogative itself, that could be 
so easily abased ? And, since the forms of slavery needed to 
exist, is it most consistent with these expressions to believe 
that they warranted that prerogative in all the hands that 
held it ; or, so far as their law could go, overthrow it entirely, 
to place in its stead the law of justice and love ? Nay, the 
very injunctions of respect and obedience which are addressed 
to the Christian slaves of Christian masters, imply distinctly 
that the master's prerogative w as, upon the face of it, incon- 
sistent with the Gospel. 1 Tim. 6, 2. — "And they that 
have believing masters, let them not despise them, because 
they are brethren." What is this but the plainest admis- 
sion, that recognized Christian brotherhood naturally tended 
to unmake the distinction of master and slave ? As for any 
reference to the seventh year of freedom taken out of the 
Jewish law, and to the possible Judaizers who might have 
insisted on the analogy, and so unsettled the minds of the 
slaves, all the commentators in the world cannot make the 
guess any thing but gratuitous, while they go on to confess — 
what Dr. Howe omits to quote with that other part of the same 
note — " that it was natural for persons so ignorant as slaves 
to regard the Gospel as freeing men from all obligations intrin- 
sically and fundamentally inconsistent with justice and equity." 
— (Bloomfield, in loc.) It will be time enough for the Pen- 
tateuch to elucidate the mystery when the Gospel has failed. 
The mistake was a very natural one, then. And how does 
the apostle rectify it ? One word would have settled the 
matter for them and for us, if he could only have uttered it. 
"What disputes and heartburnings that have disturbed and do 
disturb the church and the nations, would have been precluded 
by that one word, prerogative. Let him say for Christian mas- 
ters what he did not hesitate to say even for heathen rulers ; 
" the powers that be are ordained of God." But no such word ; 
in place of it, only this : " But rather do them service, because 
they are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit." As 
though he had said, since the relation exists, and must exist, 
and any attempt of Christian slaves to sunder it, would only 



51 

cause "the name of God and his doctrine to be blasphemed," as 
though our religion interfered with the most necessary relations ; 
do you, who have Christian masters, bear your burden with 
double cheerfulness, since you are permitted to serve those who 
are brethren and masters, at once. The difficulty and the reso- 
lution of it equally exclude the idea of the master's divine 
and standing right. Let one change the terms from " master 
and slave " to those of " parent and child," and see what a 
medley the passage would become. Any relation formally 
ordained of God would be degraded immeasurably by being 
made the subject of such an exhortation. The whole passage 
has the air of the Saviour's address to John the Baptist, " Suf- 
fer it to be so now." 

We have thus gone through the New Testament, carefully 
and candidly, and we have found the fact of slavery regulated, 
when it could not be suddenly destroyed. The principle of 
it, we have found nowhere ; but the condemnation of that 
principle, we meet on every side. Not a word is said to a 
master, that does not condemn it expressly. Scarcely a word 
to a slave, that does not imply its condemnation. And the 
whole law of love and justice disclaims the presumptuous 
affinity. 

But our opponents have one plea remaining. "VVe claim 
that only the form of slavery was tolerated ; and that, only for 
a time, and as a preparation for the speediest possible eman- 
cipation of the slaves. And we will be told that the apostles 
evidently had no anticipation of a speedy abolition of slavery ; 
that they counted so fully upon its lasting, that they gave 
no law even for the ultimate liberation of the slaves, nor 
yet for the particular emancipation of such as might be 
able to care for themselves ; that the modern opposers of 
slavery would have done all this, and are accustomed to regret 
that the apostles failed to do it. How other opposers of 
slavery may regard the apostles' action in these particulars, 
we can hardly say : but, for ourselves, we are heartily con- 
tented with it as we find it. If they judged that the end 
of the existing slavery was not near, they judged as any 
wise man might have judged, even with no inspiration to 



52 

enlighten him ; and the facts bore out their judgment. 
What prospective rule of general emancipation could have 
been given, when, under the most favorable circumstances, 
such emancipation was not to be possible for centuries 
to come ? And what particular rules of manumission 
could they give to Christian masters, without a detail 
of conditions and exceptions as long as an epistle? Let 
any one who has noticed the ground taken in the present 
argument, prepare a particular definition of cases for imme- 
diate emancipation, which one who takes that ground might 
present to-day to the masters of the South. It would need 
as many pages as these to contain them ; there would have 
to be a consideration of the health and character and age of 
the slave ; of the condition of his family ; of his prospect of a 
livelihood ; and, added to these, a consideration of the master's 
ability to dispense with his slave's services. For while we 
utterly disclaim the idea of ownership in a man, we admit 
the claim of service ; which stands by the very fact that the 
forms of slavery cannot be abolished, and which, by the con- 
scientious care of a Christian master over one who needs that 
care, acquires the sanction of justice. Where slavery exists, 
the master who has done his full duty towards his slave, has 
a claim of duty in return. And where the two find them- 
selves in that relation, equally without and against their 
choice, it is preposterous to set the interests of the one at 
zero, and to make the interests of the other infinite. They 
stand upon a level ; the master is just one man, and the slave 
another. Liberty which the slave desires is one blessing ; the 
bread of his own children, which a disabled master might 
need to sacrifice in bestowing that liberty, is another. It is 
not a plain case that where slave and children have shared in 
faithful care and instruction for years, a particular interest of 
the former should swallow up as great an interest of the latter. 
They stand upon a level. The master's real welfare counts as 
much as the slave's real welfare ; and every interest upon 
either side, stands as the value of the same interest upon the 
other. Comfort against comfort, liberty against liberty, life 
against life. Let comfort, or liberty, or life, on either side, 



53 

yield to any interest, that by the common laws of Christian 
morality, might demand the sacrifice. But who would at- 
tempt to graduate the difficult estimate ? Who will tell, by 
rule, just how much of suffering the innocent master should 
be willing to endure, in order to restore liberty to the inno- 
cent slave 1 A man might make rules till he was gray, and 
then one simple efficient rule would comprehend and over- 
ride them all ; and that would be the gospel rule, of doing 
unto others as we would that others should do unto us. Not 
that rule, with that exception that makes a slave less protected 
than a criminal. But that rule, as it stands and means, with 
no possible exception in the whole circle of morals. " Change 
places with the sufferer," says the Saviour, " and look at justice 
indeed, but from his side. Make the most, not of your rights, 
even if they be real ; never fear that they will lose any of 
their proportions ; but make the most of his, and act ac- 
cordingly." That rule is safe in the jury box and on the bench. 
And that was the apostles' rule of emancipation ; we ask no 
better or clearer one now. — But the demand is still reiterated, 
why did they not even mention the word emancipation ? 
Perhaps for the same reason that inclined them to condemn 
insubordination in the slaves ; the mere word, without the 
long details of limitation, would have fostered a spirit of res- 
tiveness that was already strong enough, and would have done 
mischief instead of good. St. Paul clearly alluded to it in 
that expression already quoted, "if thou mayest be free." 
But we do not care to insist upon the allusion ; for now we ask 
the question, why should the apostles mention emancipation ? 
Was the liberation of slaves in their day such an unheard of 
thing, that to speak of slavery, without immediately speaking 
of manumission, was to tighten the chains beyond the hope 
of loosening them ? Of what are men thinking ? Exces- 
sive emancipation was one of the very vices of society. The 
multiplication of indigent and vicious slaves by that process 
had become so great in the age of Augustus, which just pre- 
ceded that of the apostles, that he had established a law 
forbidding any man to liberate by testament more than one 
fifth of his slaves, and suffering the number thus manumitted, 



54 

in no instance to exceed one hundred. Under such circum- 
stances, were the apostles bound to set emancipation on foot, 
as a Christian novelty ? There was emancipation enough, and 
too much. Emancipation of the sick, and the old, and the 
insane, and the helpless. It wanted not increase, but direc- 
tion ; and just that the Gospel and the whole Gospel only 
could give it. 

It remains, then, that we test the justness of the views 
we have advanced, by tracing, as far as we can, the actual 
impression which the Gospel made upon slavery. Any sud- 
den results could hardly be looked for in the days of the 
apostles. The same circumstances that constrained them to 
tolerate the forms of slavery continued to exist. And it was 
only as the Christian religion spread through the empire, and 
reached its high places, that it could be expected to produce 
any marked effects. Even then, if the church, that admitted 
so many errors and occasions of strife, had been quite united 
and earnest in behalf of emancipation — a thing of which we 
have no proof — the times were not ripe, and heathen influ- 
ences still checked the energies of the Gospel. Under such 
unfavorable circumstances, facts like these are significant 
of the Gospel's tendency. Constantine, the first emperor 
who bore the name of a Christian, placed the wilful murder 
of a slave, which had hitherto been regarded only as an in- 
jury to the master, upon a level with that of a freeman ; 
thus striking one blow upon the previous notion that a slave 
was a mere chattel. The same emperor passed laws to pre- 
vent the separation of the families of slaves ; another en- 
croachment upon the master's idea of property. In the reign 
of Theodosius, slaves, Avho had in former times been suffered 
to find temporary asylums from their enraged masters in re- 
ligious places, were entitled to invoke from their retreat the 
intervention of judicial authority ; a direct assault upon the 
master's prerogative. They were even permitted to remain 
for ever within the sacred precincts to which they had fled ; 
the master could not reach them ; and the ecclesiastics were 
under obligations to care for them— a beautiful personifica- 
tion of the majesty and pity of the Gospel sheltering the 



55 

wretched, with their embrace, from evils which as yet they 
could not cure. Manumission received some encouragement 
from different Christian emperors. Yet, in spite of their 
action, the Emperor Justinian, in coming to the throne, 
found the process encumbered with so many difficulties, the 
results of the former legislation of Augustus and others, that 
the elevation of a slave to the full condition of a citizen was 
almost impossible. He passed laws that removed all those 
existing obstacles, and empowered masters to bestow upon 
their slaves, by a single act, all the advantages of a free- 
born subject. It needed only that his liberal and Christian 
policy should have been imitated by his successors, and 
slavery must have speedily expired throughout the empire. 
But his successors were not like him ; and very soon all 
interests of civilization and religion were swallowed up in 
those well-known influences that introduced the Dark Ages. 
Thus, slavery, in many European nations, lasted on, until, 
after the return of better times, the religion of the Gospel 
" had diffused through the earth such a spirit of mildness, 
gentleness, mercy, and humanity, that the heavy chains of 
personal slavery were gradually broken in most parts of the 
Christian world, and they that had been, for so many ages, 
bruised by the cruel and oppressive hand of Pagan masters, 
were at length set free."* So that, in our day, not a nation 
nor a community, that calls itself Christian, can be found, 
the world over, that retains the least vestige of that system 
of bondage, or that longs for its return. Neither Europe 
nor America would tolerate the thought of it for a moment. 
If the slavery of Ephesus or Colosse were to lift its head, 
to-day, in Charleston or Savannah, our whole nation would 
join in the horror which all Christendom would feci at the 
spectacle. For that New Testament slavery was not the 
slavery of another race, but of our very equals, possibly, in 
not a few instances, of our forefathers. The same complex- 
ion, the same features, the same native talents and energy, 

* Bishop Porteus, quoted in Blair on'j Roman Slavery; from which last- 
named author the faets just recited have been chiefly drawn. 



56 

belonged to the man that bore the yoke, as to him that 
bound it on. White slaves filled the market-places and the 
counting-rooms ; white slaves were the merchants, and arti- 
ficers, and bankers. Restore that slavery in our land, and 
the men of our own blood, whose energy and skill control 
our commerce, should be slaves ; the architect, whose taste 
designs our edifices, should be a slave ; the teachers of our 
youth might be slaves ; and the poet, whose numbers de- 
light and improve us, might be a slave. Christianity has 
done too much in the world to suffer the shameful incon- 
sistency to be possible. And so the slavery, which the Gospel 
found, is gone, and the Gospel has destroyed it. It has not 
come down to our day, with the blessing of holy hands upon 
it. The apostles of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ did 
not take that heathen monster and set it in his own chariot, 
that it might ride with him through all the nations, and 
mingle its triumphs of wrath with his triumphs of mercy. 
The libel defeats itself. It is a falsehood upon the face 
of it, 

Yet here, in these later days, has sprung up another 
slavery of a degraded race ; and when reason and com- 
mon pity frown on the outrage, the slavery of New Testa- 
ment times must be summoned to prove it right. Let that 
slavery plead for itself, and then let it plead for another. 
Make the pattern good, before you excuse the copy. But 
what do We hear ? New Testament slavery was right, yet 
it was not right, but it proves another slavery right. The 
apostles meant that it should last, but in truth it has not 
lasted, and it would be a shame to humanity if it had lasted, 
but it is a clear warrant for African slavery. What mongrel 
interpretation is this ! Why has African slavery so suddenly 
absorbed all the sanction of the Gospel to itself? Now we 
hear of the curse upon Canaan, which has no more to do 
with the people of Africa than with the people of China. 
There is not an ethnologist living who dares declare that one 
of the descendants of Canaan is in slavery in America to-day; 
and if the race retains the energy of some of their fore- 
fathers, among whom were the Phoenicians, there are few 



57 

that would venture, equal handed, to make slaves of them, 
wherever they may he found. Then we hear of the inferi- 
ority of the race — a sufficient motive with a Christian people 
for extending to them sympathy, hut very scanty proof of 
superior rights. Besides, the Gospel pattern, so confidently 
quoted, was to take the best. The kindred of our British 
forefathers were slaves in Rome. Are not we as good as the 
Romans, and why should we he contented with the poorest ? 
Since we have authority for it, why shall we not take our 
choice ? So far as the New Testament is concerned, what 
reason can he thought of, that warranted the lading of the 
slave ships of the sixteenth century upon the coast of Africa, 
that would not have warranted a foray among the mountains 
of Circassia? 

Science takes up the challenge, and comes in to the aid 
of hermeneutics. The Africans, in truth, have a separate 
origin and are not our brethren at all ; they are just as 
widely different from white men as dogs are from wolves. 
The declaration of Paul, that " God hath made of one blood 
all nations of men to dwell upon the face of all the earth," 
is not to stand against the recent discoveries ; and so, in 
some men's minds, the tottering argument stands firm again ; 
one foot on the New Testament, and the other upon that 
kind of science that laughs the New Testament to scorn. 
Let the incongruous pedestal be carefully watched, or the 
image may fall. The whole thing is too absurd for reason- 
ing. There is a sense in every unprejudiced bosom that looks 
straight through the flimsy argument. A disinterested man 
could not use it. The mind that does not perceive its weak- 
ness, even while it attempts to frame it, must be blinded by 
interest or passion, or at least by that more amiable influ- 
ence that prompts a generous heart to excuse the conduct of 
those whom it may venerate and love. 

Nay, a Christian mind, however it may defend the cause, 
is sure to confess judgment at last ; for it is the constant 
practice with such, while they deny that slavery is sinful, to 
acknowledge with Dr. Howe, that it is " an evil much to be la- 
mented." (p. 6.) The admission, be it noticed, does not concern 



'58 

the acknowledged enormities of slavery ; but that same re- 
stricted essence of slavery, which is claimed to be no sin. 
We ask then, does the admission concern the mere fact of 
slavery, or the principle of slavery as well ? If both, then 
the case is yielded ; for a principle that is evil in any possible 
sense, has no warrant from God, nd is sinful. Just that, 
we claim, is the truth in regard to one man's pretended right, 
to compel the service of another man for the benefit of the 
first. But if the fact of slavery is an evil, and the principle 
is right, then we are brought to a discovery in morals— that 
an innocent principle may uniformly produce a mischievous 
result. Our Saviour recognized no such doctrine when he 
said, a good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a 
corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. How can it be that 
slavery is one of " the bitter effects of the fall, and of the 
great wickedness of men" (p. 19), and that God still toler- 
ates it with the consent of his Gospel ? Is God's law for men 
an agent of curses, or of blessings ? Does it make it right 
" to do good, or to do evil, to save life or to kill ? " True, 
there may be evils which a man only endures, and these are 
no sins. Thus, poverty is an evil ; but what shall Ave say 
of one who makes his neighbor poor? And death is an 
evil ; but what shall we say of him who attacks his neigh- 
bor's life ? It is, in one sense, a terrible evil for a class of 
men to be " ignorant, unprincipled, and immoral ; " but what 
shall we say of a system that is adapted to make them so ? 
How much nursing does an evil need to make it a sin ? Shall 
a man without a tittle of divine authority, appoint himself an 
executor of God's judgments ? Is the justice of heaven a 
monopoly for a favored class, to pay them a percentage? 
The tide of suffering that sweeps over our earth is already 
broad enough ; woe to the man who swells it, to make it the 
stream that shall turn his mill. Woe to the man, that dares 
to plow up the surface of our common humanity, and sow his 
seeds of " evil" amid tears and blood, that they may grow 
him a crop of dollars. Take off that terrible prerogative of 
.slavery. Place the interests of a slave, as far as possible, like 



59 

those of another man, within the keeping of his own ener- 
gies and of the providence of God. Give to him that which 
is just and equal ; and then, when he suffers, our pity for 
him will be unmixed with condemnation of another. But 
for those men who bind up heavy burdens and lay them on 
other men's shoulders, to talk of the allotments of Providence, 
and of evils that are not sins, is an impertinence hard to be 
endured. 

The truth, as we regard it, is more consistent. We deny, 
with indignation, that the apostles of our Saviour tolerated 
any evil ; whether in the shape of slavery or any other. 
They were concerned simply with duty ; and duty, wherever 
performed, is only right and good. They found a system of 
slavery that was a curse ; that they never tolerated. They 
dealt with the mere forms of it, and subjected them to such 
regulations as made them the very reparation of the previous 
wrong. There was one body of slavery, but it had two sep- 
arate souls ; the first was the terrible prerogative of the 
masters, and with that in it, slavery was evil, and only evil, 
and that continually. But the Gospel, that makes strange 
conversions, took that hard and stony heart out of it, and 
gave it a heart of flesh. And so far only did the Gospel ap- 
prove it. In the case of wicked masters who would not sub- 
mit to its rules, it tolerated slavery as it tolerated any other 
form of oppression ; it inculcated patience. In the hands of 
Christian masters, slavery was an agent for a particular result. 
The result was important, and no other agent could take its 
place ; and so far it was good. Liberty indeed, with the 
conditions that fitted for it, would have been better still ; 
just as health is better than convalescence. Yet convales- 
cence is not an evil ; the evils that are in it belong to the 
sickness, and they are not tolerated, but attacked. 

A man may take this ground, of the temporary necessity 
of the forms of slavery, and condemn the principle of it ; 
or, he may uphold the righteousness and excellence of the 
whole system : and in either case may be consistent, and not 
condemn the apostles for tolerating slavery. But for a man 
to confess that slavery is an evil, and then to represent the 



60 

apostles, not only as not condemning it, but as sanctioning the 
very principle that sustains it, is either to make a most im- 
prudent concession ; or to hold strange views of the office of an 
apostle. Our opponents must abandon one position or the 
other. No mortal proportions are competent to occupy them 
both. They admit so promptly that slavery is an evil, and 
their argument for the apostles' approbation of it, seems so 
little convincing, that we are constrained to believe they will 
stand by their perceptions rather than their proofs, and hold 
with us, that since slavery as a system is evil, as a system, the 
apostles can never have tolerated it. 

Our investigations in the New Testament, have led us to 
the following results : 

1. That the holding a man in involuntary servitude, for 
the benefit of the master rather than of the slave, is repug- 
nant to the plainest principles of the Gospel, and to the speci- 
fic directions of the apostles concerning slavery ; and has 
nothing to shield it from the charge of abominable wicked- 
ness. 

2. That the wickedness of such slaveholding is not to be 
imputed to the master, who, finding himself, without his own 
act, in a relation of guardianship to a dependent man, regu- 
lates the relation by the simple laws of Gospel love and 
justice. — We grant very cheerfully then, that point which 
some defenders of slavery think it necessary for them to 
maintain, namely, that a man may have absolute power and 
not be criminal. For external circumstances, which he can- 
not control, may have placed it in his hands. No man was 
ever in a relation of more absolute power, than that which 
the Good Samaritan, in the parable, sustained to the wounded 
and helpless traveller ; or than a mother sustains to her help- 
less infant. A man is no more to be blamed for being pro- 
nounced by a law which he does not approve, to be the ab- 
solute proprietor of a slave, than he is for being made by his 
Creator with stronger muscles than another. But this ad- 
mission does not touch the simple question ; is it right for 
any human agency to sustain, or tolerate a law, which is just 
designed to give one man despotic power over another man ? 



61 

To make that a mere question of expediency, as some do, 
upon the ground that the patriarchs and some kings have 
had, and have needed absolute power for the very welfare of 
their subjects, is no fairer than to maintain, that since some 
men have been physically strong, and have needed to be so 
for the help of those who were weak or wounded, therefore, 
it is a question of expediency whether, in any particular case, 
one man's strength is to be increased at the expense of another's. 
It is a question solely for that providence, which makes one 
man weak, and fits another to be his helper ; and of divine 
law, that commits to the powerful just so much authority as 
the necessities of the helpless may need. As to that cate- 
gory of things indifferent, in which the absolute control of 
the master is sought to be put ; when was it so extended 
as to include questions that concern the clearest interests and 
rights of one's fellow-men ? The small dust of the balance 
perhaps may not turn the beam, but the weightier matters 
of the law, justice, mercy and faith, are to be estimated to the 
nicest hair. If any question in morals may be left to the 
toss of a penny, — a position which a careful analysis will ut- 
terly condemn, — that of one man's absolute or despotic 
authority over another man, is the very last to be trusted to 
such a decision. The case, with the example of the apostles 
to guide us, is so plain, that it cannot be confused. They 
found one man in power, and another in dependence. To 
them and to Christian masters the relation was a simple act 
of providence. It was no model after which men are to make 
other facts. To say that such a fact of providence is no sin 
to the passive subject of it, is a truism almost too bald to be 
stated. Under that fact duty arises. It is not suddenly to 
abjure every trace of that power without which, those who 
have already suffered under it, can by no means be relieved ; 
but it is to reduce it immediately to that measure and form 
of lawful authority that is fixed by the universal principles 
of kindness and justice. We hold then that the authority of 
a master, under certain circumstances and within certain 
limits, may be as lawful as that of a parent. Let us attempt 
to define those limits and circumstances. 



62 

Lawful authority, however the occasions and the forms of 
it may vary, has but one essence. It is power over those 
who are actually dependent, and it is limited to the demands 
of thai dependence. We deny that such a thing is known or 
possible under the government of God, as authority commis- 
sioned to limit the advantage of its subjects. On the other 
hand, we maintain that the design of all lawful authority is 
to encourage and protect the extension of such advantage to 
its widest limits. It is so with the government of God him- 
self; the aim of which is to promote the welfare of his crea- 
tures, not to a certain arbitrary point, but to the extent of 
their capacity. The same is true of civil government ; the 
same of the government of the husband, or the father. For 
however men may differ in their views of the tendency of par- 
ticular forms of civil, marital, or parental authority ; all agree 
that the true idea of such authority, is defined by the greatest 
real advantage of those over whom it is exercised. Such real 
advantage in no case consists in absolute license. For there 
are two classes of evils to which the subjects of lawful authority 
are exposed, and against which such authority is appointed to 
guard. The first consists of all those evils that are entirely 
external to the subject, and the remedy for which is protection. 
The other consists of such evils as grow naturally out of the 
vices, or inexperience, or depravity of the subject himself, and 
the remedy for these is control and discipline. The element 
of restraint is therefore indispensable to lawful authority ; and 
it is the measure and design of that restraint that pronounce 
authority unlawful. For it is evident that the subjects of 
authority are exposed to a third class of dangers, which may 
spring out of the authority itself. If those who wield the 
power are men of like passions with those who are the subjects 
of it, why should all the restraints be gathered about the 
latter, and the former be free to act without control ? All 
human power needs to be carefully defined and checked, or it 
runs into despotism. Now the authority that is not sufficient 
to guard its subjects against the two classes of evils first men- 
tioned is too weak. But the authority that is not itself 
guarded against the third danger is too great. God only is 



63 

absolute. His sovereignty is our safety. " For the Lord is gra- 
cious and full of compassion ; " " righteousness and judgment 
are the habitation of his throne." All other authority has 
its limited and appointed uses, and its excellence lies in its 
proportion to its end. When the dangers that are external 
to the governing power, are greater than that which lies 
within it, that power may appropriately incline in that degree 
towards absolutism ; not because the ruler chooses or has any 
divine right to be absolute, but because the very definition of 
lawful authority requires him, under the given circumstances, 
to be so. Thus patriarchal authority, in its day, was right ; 
and, under some circumstances, an absolute monarchy still is 
right. But the very same rule that establishes it in one case 
forbids it in another ; and that rule is the true interest and 
safety of those who are governed. 

In regard to civil government, the question how far it 
should be intrusted with absolute power, is sure to decide 
itself. For the prerogative of the sovereign will always com- 
pare exactly with the helplessness of the subjects ; and the 
two will be in inverse proportion to the intelligence of the 
latter, and their general capacity for self-government. No 
man can long contiuue a despot, except over those who need a 
despot to rule them. In regard to k the government L of the 
family, the case is different. The children and wife of a 
tyrannical father have no such means at their command for 
checking his despotism, as the subjects of a civil ruler may 
bring to bear on him. A race degraded into slavery is more 
helpless still ; no influences of natural affection soften the 
despotism under which they suffer. The intelligence, the 
concert, the civil power, all are with the masters ; and there 
is no door for their release, but such as the masters themselves 
may choose to open. Hence resulted the apparent anomalies 
of those ancient republics, in which the citizens were free, for 
they had intelligence enough to control their rulers ; while 
wives and children, and the multitudes of their slaves were 
held in the most abject bondage. The general despotism 
that belonged to the earliest conditions of society, had been 
half cured. Above the citizen was justice ; below him was 



64 

oppression. The pure selfishness of the dominant class was 
the parent of both results. At this point the Gospel comes 
in to complete the work, which mere civilization begins but 
cannot finish ; and, by its principles of love and justice, it 
attacks that despotism of the father and the master which 
the helplessness of its subjects is incompetent to reach, and 
establishes for every form of authority that universal law, 
" All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto 
you, do ye even so unto them." Where natural affection has 
co-operated with the Gospel, their triumph may be considered 
to have become complete. There is no Christian nation that 
tolerates any other government of the family, than that which 
aims to secure the greatest advantage of all its members. 
The last remnant of the universal despotism is slavery ; and 
the Christian republic of America prolongs the anomalous 
injustice of pagan Home and Athens. 

But the defenders of slavery claim that the essence of a 
master's authority is analogous to that of a ruler, or father, 
or husband. We accept the analogy, and will hold them to 
it. The authority of the latter, by the consent of Christen- 
dom, is limited, that the advantage of the subjects may be 
unrestricted. The authority of the master for which we 
contend is limited too, by the very same Gospel, and to the 
very same measure and end, namely, that the advantage of 
the subject may be unrestricted. The slaveholding that leaves 
a slave to make the greatest ultimate advancement in property, 
and intelligence, and social and political position for which his 
own true energy and merit adapt him, embodies a measure of 
authority that is wholly lawful. But for one to plead for a kind 
of authority, that defines and restricts the advantage of its 
subjects, and extends itself to sustain the restriction ; and 
then to summon the lawful authority of the state, or of the 
family to keep such a gratuitous despotism in countenance, is, 
in fact, to abandon his cause. It is a mere quibble upon the 
word authority. The same sort of reasoning would establish 
an analogy between the power of a parent and that of a 
pirate, or between the powers of light and the powers of dark- 
ness. 



65 

We admit and insist, then, that there may be a lawful 
authority of a master over an involuntary servant or slave * 
but that that authority cannot exceed the limits at which all 
other lawful authority is fixed. But we insist, besides, that 
the lawfulness of such authority is not perpetual and uni- 
versal, but local and occasional : created, not by a constant 
necessity of the race, and a constant divine warrant adapted 
to that necessity, but by the general laws of the Gospel, in 
their application to particular circumstances. To this the 
friends of slavery will not consent : but they insist that it 
must take its stand upon the very level with those other and 
permanent relations, which we have been noticing. And their 
strong argument is this : That the Scriptures give rules for 
the deportment of masters and slaves, in the very lists which 
contain similar rules for magistrates and subjects ; for hus- 
bands and wives ; and for parents and children ; and, that 
the command of obedience to masters is, in its form, the 
very echo of that command of the Decalogue which requires 
children to honor their parents. Granting, now, the most 
that can be asked, and what is by no means true — namely, 
that the apostles intended these lists as a formal and equal 
warrant for all the relations included within them ; even 
then, they did not warrant every relation that could be desig- 
nated by the terms they used, but only the lawful relations 
which answered to those terms. For example, when they 
use the word " wife," they are not to be quoted as proving 
that every relation of wives to husbands is lawful : for, in 
that case, they would approve polygamy ; and when they 
speak of " kings," they surely do not enjoin submission to 
every usurper. Now the fundamental question, In what 
form is each of these relations lawful ? is in no way answered 
in the rules themselves, but that answer is in each instance 
presupposed ; and if it were not for sufficient information 
concerning the lawful relation of parent and child, of hus- 
band and wife, of ruler and subject, derived from other 
sources, these mere rules would be utterly nugatory. They 
define the duties, but the relations that involve them they 



66 

do not define at all. Whence shall the several definitions 
come ? We answer without difficulty : 

1st. The relation of parent and child is defined by nature, 
outside of the Scriptures, in terms so plain that any formal 
definition within them would have been idle. Without that 
definition of nature, a hundred such commands as that of the 
Decalogue or of the apostles, to "honor" parents or "obey" 
them, would never have established the relation. The same 
law of nature that establishes that relation at all, makes it 
universal ; and in this way only can the commands referred 
to extend themselves to the race. They go where the re- 
lation goes, and the relation goes everywhere. 

2d. The law of marriage is not defined by nature ; for 
nature does not fix the persons and number of men's wives, 
as it does those of their children. If it does, the history of 
our race proves that it leaves room for sad mistakes ; and, 
therefore, we have the formal announcement of the law of 
marriage extending even to the prohibition of unjust divorces. 
" For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and 
cleave to his wife ; and they twain shall be one flesh." Mark, 
x. 7, 8. " Whosoever shall put away his wife and marry 
another committeth adultery against her;" verse 11. The 
relation being thus defined, it may extend as far as it can ; 
and the law of nature extends it everywhere. 

3d. In the case of civil government, no definition of the 
form of the relation is given, either by nature or by Scrip- 
ture. It is left to be decided by universal principles of 
justice in their adaptation to particular circumstances. But 
the universality of the relation is determined, both by the 
necessities of the race, and by the most formal Divine war- 
rant : " The powers that be are ordained of God : whosoever 
therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God." 
The magistrate is the " minister of God : " " a revenger to 
execute wrath upon him that doeth evil." Bom. xiii. 

Each of these three relations is appointed for the race ; 
and in one way or another, either by nature, or by particu- 
lar scriptural law, or by the general laws of the Gospel, it is 
made impossible for men to doubt, either in what the several 



67 

relations consist, or how far they may he extended. The 
mere form of each of these relations, and men's right to estab- 
lish them, would have been as well understood in the world 
to-day, if not one of the apostles' rules, above referred to, 
had been given. 

Now we come to the lawful relation of master and slave. 
And we demand, first, the organic law that establishes the 
relation ; and then the formal divine warrant for making it 
universal. Both are utterly wanting. Not a word, not a 
syllable, in the whole Grospel, not an expression outside of 
that limited and peculiar law of Israel, helps us to guess 
how slavery is to begin. If it is claimed to be defined by 
nature, as is the relation of parent and child, it is hard to 
see how a man can use the language without discovering the 
fallacy. For, we ask, does any law of mere nature make a 
man the master of slaves ? Does it belong to society, in its 
necessary condition, not that one man should be poorer or 
more ignorant than another, or that one class of men should 
be dependent for their social advantages upon other classes 
of men ; but that one particular man should need the control 
and protection of another particular man, just as a child 
needs the protection, and control of a parent ? That one man 
may come to stand in such a relation to another, we cheer- 
fully admit. We are only doubting whether mere nature 
places him in it. If a colony, in which there are neither 
children nor slaves, should be planted in any remote terri- 
tory, will the lapse of twenty years bring slaves into the new 
community as surely as children, and both by God's appointed 
law of nature ? * Slaveholding may be necessary and justi- 
fiable, but nature has not established it. It comes by an- 
other process. 

All lawful authority grows out of dependence. There is a 
certain dependence of every man upon the control and pro- 
tection of his fellow-men. Civil government meets the de- 

* The blunt Romans acknowledged that slavery was contrary to nature 
(contra naturam). Justinian's Instit., L. 1., Tit. 4. The more subtle Greeks dis- 
puted the point. It has been left for Christian philosophers to establish its 
lawfulness both by nature and their sacred books. 



68 

mands of this. That one man should be poorer, or more 
ignorant, or more depraved than another, does not demand 
for him the intervention of another authority than that of 
the State, until the care of general laws cannot be specific 
enough to meet his demands. It cannot in the case with 
children, and therefore the civil law wisely recognizes the 
appointment of God, by which the father is the guardian of 
the child. The same is the case with the insane ; the re- 
straint of whom is lawful. So far as punishment is remedial, 
and not exemplary, this is the case with criminals. The 
same is the case with vagrants. In each such instance the 
law appoints a kind of authority to care for those who can- 
not, or will not, care for themselves. Now, it is plain that 
cases may arise in which, from some imbecility, one man may 
seek to throw himself upon the particular care of another 
man. If the latter accepts the trust, he is surely entitled 
to exercise so much authority over his ward as is consistent 
with that indispensable idea of all authority — namely, the 
unrestricted advantage of its subject. He is entitled to as 
much service as shall fairly compensate him for the support 
and protection which he extends to the helpless man ; for 
that is a simple matter of justice, with which the true ad- 
vantage of the latter cannot be inconsistent. If the depend- 
ent is addicted to vices, the superior is entitled to restrain 
them by the rules and methods which common justice and 
the circumstances may define. All this may be a matter of 
consent between the two ; or if the subject of such equitable 
authority should resist it, the civil government, upon proof 
of the actual incompetence of the inferior to care for himself, 
may rightfully appoint the other his guardian or " committee." 
The power conferred in that case, in order to be just, would 
need to be limited to the true and unrestricted advantage of 
the subject of it ; for the government itself could possess no 
right inconsistent with such advantage, and it could not de- 
pute an authority which it did not possess. 

It is easy to see that cases like that just supposed, might 
be multiplied, though not without pre-supposing some griev- 
ous wrong, of which the degraded class had been the subjects. 



69 

But the wrong having been done, and the dependence of these 
upon their superiors being actual, and incapable of immediate 
remedy, the government, under which such cases existed, 
might make them the occasion of a general law, appointing 
or recognizing each man's actual guardian as his lawful mas- 
ter. But in that case still, the authority deputed by civil law, 
could never exceed the authority which such law itself pos- 
sessed. Or if the master's authority could be thought to come 
from some other source than the civil law, it could not, with- 
out some formal warrant from God, transcend those fixed 
limits of all authority — the unrestricted advantage of its sub- 
jects. Such a warrant is not to be produced. It would be a 
stain upon our religion if it were. And thus slavery stands, 
not by any definition or charter of a master's rights, contained 
in the Word of God, or in the mere law of nature ; but by 
particular exigencies of society, and by that common law 
of the Gospel which defines duty in regard to them. It 
stands by no exception to the Saviour's rule of equal love and 
justice, but it is based upon that rule itself. Such is the es- 
sence of lawful slavery. Neither Scripture nor nature admits 
a different definition. 

And now, in regard to the universality of the relation : 
men attempt to put it upon a footing with those others 
which the apostles made the subject of their rules, and to es- 
tablish the relation of master and slave by as lasting a war- 
rant, and as general, as that which sustains the rest, We 
demand that the warrant be produced. We have it for 
the relation of parent and child ; we have it for marriage ; we 
have it for civil government. Nature makes the first two uni- 
versal ; and common necessities of our race, that are just one 
remove from nature, together with the formal law of God, do 
the same for the third. But what is the appointed field for 
the relation of master and slave ? The rules of the apostles 
do not define it, for they never tell where slavery is lawful, and 
where it is not. It surely is not lawful everywhere. Are we 
to understand that all those Christian communities in which 
slavery is unknown, have departed just as far from the ap- 
pointment of nature and of God, as if they had abolished 
marriage or civil government ? If any one is wild enough to 



70 

take such ground as this, he must decide by some clear rule, 
which portion of the offending community has sinned in de- 
clining the mastership, and ought to resume it ; and which 
portion should be converted into slaves. It must be plain to 
the most earnest defender of the system, that it was not in- 
tended to be quite universal. Then what is to draw the line ? 
Who shall be masters, and who shall not ? Is it a mere mat- 
ter of choice with the master ? No other relation is formed 
in that way. No man in a civilized land is a ruler because he 
chooses to be, or a husband because he chooses to be ; and 
even the helpless child has his guardian appointed by the act 
of God. How should one of two men become the master of 
the other just by his choice ? There can be but one rule by 
which, with God's approbation, one man becomes a master, 
and another a slave ; and that is the actual dependence of 
certain individual men upon other individual men, for a kind 
of care and protection which civil government is not adapted 
to afford. The relation presupposes, upon the part of the for- 
mer, conditions and risks essentially the same with those that 
belong to children. And those conditions and risks actually 
existing, it is proper that they be met by an adequate guar- 
dianship. But how shall one enforce the remedy where there 
is no disease ? If one man is weaker than another, and the 
laws of the State either protect him in his weakness, or may 
be made to do so, upon what ground shall another, who is 
stronger, offer himself as his protector, and rob him of his 
liberty to save him from dangers which do not exist ? If 
such an interference may be made at all, to what extent may 
it be carried ? Whenever one is persuaded that his neighbor 
would be a better Christian, and father, and more useful to 
society, if he should assume the care of his concerns, is he at 
liberty to make the experiment ? And if civil law may for- 
bid the effort, is positive civil law the only obstacle ? Can it 
be right that one man's whim, seconded by his power, should 
make another his mere subject ? But perhaps other nations, 
less favored than that which contains the masters, may appro- 
priately furnish them with slaves. Bat what principle of the 
law of nations or of God entitles a man to do, beyond the 



71 

power of his own government, that which it would be wrong 
to do within it ? Has his own government debarred him of 
some natural right, in forbidding him to make slaves within its 
limits, or have the citizens of his nation some natural rights 
which do not belong to those who are born beyond it ? 
Perhaps their rights are equal, but their advantages are less ; 
and thus it becomes the duty of the more refined, to make 
themselves the guardians of the more degraded. But what 
charged these particular men with the care of those ? What 
cry of dependence, wafted across oceans, moved to Christian 
pity the parental heart of the would-be master? What 
heaven-appointed agent was it that hung that burden upon 
his arm, and charged him like a father, or husband, or ruler, 
to seek the greatest advantage of his new found charge ? 
Was it a mere wish for a servant, attaining its result by all 
the terrible machinery of the slave trade ? Then that 
amounts to proof that God never intended that slavery should 
grow in that direction. He builds up the family in peace and 
blessing ; he establishes the state in justice ; and he never 
made it a process of his Gospel, that crime should be com- 
mitted to nourish slavery. To make one man a dependent of 
another, when he is no dependent in fact, is, under the Gcs- 
pel,* as it was even under the Mosaic law, f a crime of the 
first magnitude — a pure wrong, which no remote prospect of 
good can warrant — an act of mere tyranny, which, having no 
foundation in fact, can have no limit but the advantage or 
caprice of those who establish it. The very design and office 
of civil government, of the law of nations, and of the law of 
God, is not to originate or maintain any such assumptions, but 
to overshadow and crush them. 

Men may reason as they will, then, concerning social rela- 
tions, and attempt to include slaveholding among them. It 
may have its place there, and God may sanction it, but with 
this distinction ; that there is not a spot upon the face of the 
earth to which the rest are forbidden to go at any moment. 
There is no ordinary community from which they can be inno- 

* 1 Tim. 1. 10. fEx. 21. 1G 



72 

cently excluded. But slavehokling, as God approves it, must 
watch its time. It comes in the train of terrible wrongs, like 
those messengers of mercy who traverse a battle-field after the 
fight is over, lift up the fainting head, stanch and bind up 
the gaping wounds, give hope and help and tender care, and 
get for their reward, ' the blessing of him that was ready to 
perish/ Here is the slavehokling that has the Gospel war- 
rant. May it plant itself wherever it can find foothold. May 
it last till it has done its work. 

In regard to American slavery, then, we hold that the fol- 
lowing positions are established equally by reason and the 
Gospel : — 

1. That the principle and method of its establishment are 
equally abhorrent to the plainest principles of justice and 
humanity. 

2. That every present law that confers authority upon the 
master, for any purpose, or to any degree inconsistent with the 
unrestricted advantage of the slave, maintains and aggravates 
the original wrong, and is utterly condemned by every rule 
of right. 

The fact that incidental advantages may have accrued to 
the oppressed race from their captivity, in no way touches the 
propriety of their enslavement. If such advantages are to 
warrant the influences that may bring men into possession of 
them, it is not possible to think of any outrages beyond those 
of the slave-trade, (if those are not the greatest possible,) that 
could not be warranted upon the same ground. For Chris- 
tians hold that the knowledge and possession of true religion 
are the greatest of possible blessings : and one can easily 
think of violence committed by one citizen upon the person 
of another, in defiance of all law, and ending in secret im- 
prisonment and torture, that might yet bring the subject of it 
into contact with books or with some fellow-sufferer, whose 
influence in connection with the terrible discipline the sufferer 
might endure, might lead to his conversion. Fancy his tor- 
turer, when aware of the result, felicitating himself upon his 
agency in producing it. One would think that the Word of 



73 

God was full enough of instances of blessed results following 
the most wicked agencies, to make any man, with sense or 
conscience, shrink from making any possible good results of 
American slavery, stand as the defenders of the system. It 
has hardly done more for the slaves and for their countrymen 
than did the brethren of Joseph and the wife of Potiphar for 
him and fur Egypt ; or than did the wicked Hainan for Morde- 
cai and his brethren ; or than did the chief-priests and the 
Pharisees for the world for which Christ died. If all the 
good that God accomplishes by means of men's sins, is to 
count, in behalf of those who have committed the sins, some 
men, whom the world esteems as wretches, must outshine the 
very angels of light. Are we never to hear the last of this 
shallow plea ? When men are confronted with the plainest 
condemnation of the law of God, are they to shelter them- 
selves behind his providence, and tell us, complacently, that 
God hath made the wrath of man to praise him ? 

3. Where that system of bondage already exists, it is the 
duty of every man, who is at all implicated in it, to use his best 
efforts to place it at once upon the footing of the Gospel and of 
natural right — namely, of authority exercised for the unrestrict- 
ed advantage of its subjects. It is not his duty either to disband 
his own unprovided slaves, or to clamor senselessly for abolition. 
The Christian slaveholders of our land find themselves in the 
midst of circumstances, not unlike those with which their 
early brethren had to deal. They are under a law which ex- 
tends a necessary authority to most unjust proportions ; and 
the dictate of wisdom and the Gospel is not to repeal the 
law, but to repeal so much of it as is unjust, The embank- 
ments which even arbitrary enactments have raised around a 
sea of evils, are not to be suddenly broken down. Nay, the 
greater the past wrongs of slavery, the stronger the demand 
that slavery be not ended in the greatest wrong of all — 
namely, the withdrawment, from ignorant and vicious men, 
of the only control that can save them from incalculable 
crime and suffering. A man may abate none of his philan- 
thropy, and yet entertain serious doubts whether all the past 
action of Christian states and nations, for the emancipation 



74 

of slaves, has been most wisely and successfully conducted. 
The whole question of the abolishment of slavery is to be 
decided, not by the sudden impulses of even the best human- 
ity ; surely not by the strained notions of any who can see 
but one evil under the sun, and are willing to sacrifice all 
interests to its destruction. That is not good surgery that 
kills a patient for the sake of conquering his disease. The 
hand that is eager to pull the tares, must be sure that the 
wheat will not be plucked up with them. The wisdom of the 
wisest may well be summoned to the elucidation of so com- 
plex a problem ; and time may be made to do kindly, what 
haste cannot do at all. 

Meanwhile, religion, and truth, and common humanity, 
have one demand to make ; that the curse be not baptized as 
a blessing ; that the disease be not fostered at the expense of 
the health that remains, and that the wheat be not trampled 
down for the sake of watering the tares. Let us know things 
by their true names. Slaveholding, except as a merciful care 
of the helpless, is, under Gospel law, a sin. Any agency 
of one man, or of a nation, that fastens the yoke when it 
might grow lighter — that adds to the bondage a single element 
that is not necessary, by the common laws of Christian 
morality — is a sin, and there is nothing to excuse it. No 
word of the Bible stands forth to plead for the outrage. 
"Which one of those passages that we have quoted, is it that 
contains the germ of those laws of our Southern States 
which tolerate the separation of households — a thing which a 
half heathen emperor forbade fifteen hundred years ago ; or of 
those which forbid the education of slaves ; or of those which 
leave the slave without security against even the murderous 
rage of the master, if only the eye of no white man shall 
witness the encounter ; or which leave the virtue of every 
slave woman no protection but the master's conscience ? It 
is but little more than a month since the writer of these 
pages heard, in the saloon of one of our most frequented 
steamers, a gray-headed man, whose dress and language indi- 
cated education and wealth — and who was called by name by 
some of those about him — assert, with a grossness of expression 



75 

which it pollutes the page to hint at, his own paternity of 
many of the slaves of his plantation, and his absolute power 
over the victims of his lust. He is not quoted as a fair ex- 
ample of a Southern slaveholder. For the credit of humanity 
we are prompt to hope that such a man is the object of loath- 
ing in the community in which he lives. But the law that 
admits of even one such instance, admits of ten thousand. 
The flippant boast of power which this wretch made, could be 
repeated by just so many others as should choose to be like 
him. Who knows how many of the victims of such enormities 
may be actual Christians ? We demand New Testament war- 
rant for the system. The author of the argument we are 
reviewing, though he has used general terms, must have re- 
stricted them in his own mind to a meaning which no system 
of slaveholding, at least in Gospel times, has ever exemplified. 
Surely, with a view of the essential features of American 
slavery in his mind, he could never have penned and sought 
to prove that unguarded proposition, " Slaveholding not sin- 
ful." The word has two meanings. Slaveholding, as the law 
establishes it, and with no other restraints than the laws 
throw around it, may well be such a sin that nearly every 
threatening of God's Word shall discharge itself upon it; and 
slaveholding, beneath some Christian roof, and regulated by 
the principles of love and justice, may be the very ministra- 
tion of mercy. We are not to be told that such variations 
may enter into every relation. It is not true. There is no 
relation that God has made lawful, that does not admit of 
such a definition that the restraints of civil law can be 
gathered close around it, and every serious excess can have its 
appointed punishments. Slaveholding, as a remedial system, 
might be similarly defined and guarded. But how shall you 
arrange checks within a system that begins by making one 
human being the chattel of another ? What shall be the 
abuses of that which itself abuses all natural right? How 
will you restrain its excesses without attacking its substance ? 
In point of fact, we demand, what other relation is there 
within the law of civilized nations that admits, without a legal 
penalty, such crimes as in the law of slavery go uncon- 
demned ? 



76 

It cannot be a hair-splitting nicety that makes a distinc- 
tion between this slavery of law and that other slaveholding 
of mercy ; the one holds the disease in the embrace of walls 
and dungeons, where the light and breath of heaven are for- 
bidden to reach it ; and the other throws wide open the in- 
fected dwelling, and every Gospel influence of justice and 
love breathes through it " with healing on its wings." Under 
these circumstances, the true interests of the slave call for 
discriminating action. An unqualified condemnation of slave- 
holding would be as unjust and as mischievous as an unquali- 
fied approval of it. You may burn the wheat with the chaff, 
or you may garner the chaff with the wheat. If yon will do 
neither of these, you must separate the two. It is not the 
slaveholding of the Gospel that curses the half of our nation, 
and disturbs the rest, but a system of gratuitous wrong and 
oppression, and there is only one resolution of the difficulty, 
and that is, Do right. If it is hard to know what right is, 
those who revere the Gospel will suffer it to decide. 

Let Christian masters reduce their own slaveholding: to 
the strict model furnished by the apostles, and make it a 
slaveholding that is just and equal, — that expressly disclaims 
right upon the part of one man that may swallow up any 
right upon the part of another, — that sets its subjects above 
that condition of mere bondage, which men call slavery, into 
a relation consistent with brotherly love of their persons and 
their characters. While such a relation lasts, it is hard to 
think of duties more solemn or more weighty than it imposes. 
May God guide and help the Christian master who finds him- 
self the guardian, and instructor, and chief exemplar, of scores 
or hundreds of ignorant, and vicious, and superstitious men, 
for his care of whom he must give account. May God pardon 
the thoughtless men, who, making a sacred trust the ground 
of their authority, either neglect that trust themselves, or 
barter it for money into hands that may despise it utterly. 
How shall one who pleads that God has made him his bro- 
ther's keeper, leave the voice of his brother's blood to cry unto 
God from the ground ? — The question, How soon a Christian 
master should terminate such a relation entirely, must, in 



77 

the absence of any civil regulations, be left to the enlightened 
conscience and the law of love. 

Every Christian citizen living under slave laws has an 
important duty to perform. If he were living under a despot- 
ism, his duties would all be private. But a slaveholder in 
our day, unlike those to whom the apostles wrote, stands in 
the midst between the law and the slave, and in his double 
character of citizen and master, controls them both. It is 
not enough for a good citizen to say in his heart that he did 
not make a wicked law, and that he wishes it was changed. 
Let him say it aloud, and give his reasons. If by any part 
of his conduct he can be thought to be approving the iniqui- 
tous statute, the duty is more imperative still. He not only 
tolerates the wrong, but he abets it ; for the sin grows bolder 
by his example. No prudence can excuse his silence. The 
struggle is one of right against wrong, and it will never be an 
easy one. Let those who love the right begin it at once, and, 
with prayer to God, " labor and Avait." Every good citizen, 
who has the existing laws of slavery in any degree within his 
control, is entitled to demand that they reduce immediately 
the authority of the master to that standard of all lawful 
authority, namely, the unrestricted advantage of its subjects. 
Let civil law be made the helper of good masters, and not a 
license for bad ones ; and the evils of slavery would be miti- 
gated at once, and the end of it could not be very distant. 

All legislators who have to deal with slavery have a 
responsibility from which they cannot shield themselves. 
They are the ministers of God. The foundation of all true 
statesmanship is in absolute justice, and a Christian statesman 
must hold that the Gospel is the ultimate rule. It can never 
be dangerous to follow that rule, for the Gospel and true 
policy are not foes, but friends. What is right is always best. 
Thus, if the master's prerogative were limited immediately to 
such a claim of service as the laws of the Gospel would fully 
admit under the circumstances, there could be no loss of ser- 
vice, no loss of necessary authority and control ; but only a 
loss of factitious right to control one man against his true 
benefit, and for the benefit of another. If the test of capacity, 



78 

which has been applied to the African race in this country, 
could be thought, to have proved conclusively and finally that 
a state of slavery is the only one consistent with their true 
advantage, the law, as their merciful guardian, might take 
care that their slavery should be perpetual. It would only 
need to define the terms and conditions of their bondage 
within those limits which such true advantage should actually 
demand. With what propriety the advocates of the hopeless 
inferiority of the African race would fix those limits where 
they now are, it is hard to see. Since their degradation is 
hopeless, at least relieve it as far as possible. 

But that whole pretence is too shallow to be made with- 
out blushing. A man would not undertake to decide the 
qualities of a breed of sheep that had been developed under 
influences as unfavorable as those under which the African 
race has been held in this country. The last defender of that 
doctrine of incapacity, with whom the present writer has 
conversed, was an intelligent Southern gentleman, the an- 
tipode of him already quoted. Before he ended the conver- 
sation, which had wandered away from the first topic, he told 
of a slave of his father's, " well educated," as he described 
him, who acted the part of a physician among his fellow- 
slaves, and not unfrequently in the family of his master. 
" He has bled me," said the narrator, extending his right 
arm, " many a time ; " and he proceeded to tell how this 
slave, upon some groundless fear of being sold South, had 
escaped to Boston ; from which city he had written a manly 
and well expressed letter to explain the course he had taken. 
The high esteem in wdiich he had been held, and the gener- 
osity of those to whom he wrote saved him from molestation, 
and he was yet in freedom. It was not till the author of this 
statement had defined the subject of it to be a full-blooded 
African, that he remembered the position he had been de- 
fending a while before. — The legislation that begins in the 
foregone conclusion, that the race of slaves in our country 
cannot be fitted for freedom, begins in an arrogant assump- 
tion, and all the precautions that are taken to keep them in 
bondage confess it. Did ever a bolder absurdity insult com- 



79 

mon sense, than that which insists, in one breath, that Afri- 
cans need to he slaves because they cannot be improved, and 
that they need to be debarred from education to keep them 
slaves ? How soon the day of their liberation may come, 
time and wisdom and just laws only can decide. The remedy 
is in men's hands, the cure is in God's. 

A just legislation upon slavery within the limits in which 
it is already established, would remove at once all possible 
ground of the discord which now disturbs our nation. It is 
not the question of a man's right to hold slaves in any or 
every part of our land that has. originated and sustained this 
most mischievous turmoil. Our fellow-countrymen of the 
South are justified in demanding their rights in this particu- 
lar, and the North and the country would be most guilty in 
refusing them. The only room for mistake is in the inter- 
pretation of those rights. If the parties who are interested 
can agree upon them, the case is plain ; if they cannot, the 
appeal must be made to law ; for under a constitutional 
government every question of right is to be resolved by law 
in some form, and not by the mere power or caprice of one 
of the parties. The laws that touch the matter of slavery 
are these : 1st. There is the law of God in the Gospel, which 
all Christians recognize ; and this admits one man's claim to 
another man's service ; but it admits no more. 2d. Next 
there is the law of nations by which slavery is " contrary to 
the nature of man," and implies a constant " state of war " 
between the two parties of such a relation.- - 3d. Next there 

* " Is it lawful to condemn prisoners of war to slavery ? Yes, in eases which 
give a right to kill,— when they have rendered themselves personally guilty of 
some crime deserving death. The ancients used to sell their prisoners ol war 
for slave?. They, indeed, thought they had a right to put them to death. In 
every circumstance, where I cannot innocently take away my prisoner's life, I 
have no right to make him a slave. If I spare his life, and condemn him to a 
state so contrary to the nature of man, I still continue with him the state of 
war; he lies under no obligation to me, for what is life without freedom? [f 
any one counts life a favor where the grant of it is attended with chains, be 
it so; det him accept the kindness, submit to the destiny which awaits him, 
and fulfil the duties annexed to it. But he must apply to some other writer to 
teach him those duties; there have been authors enough who have amply 
treated of them. I shall dwell no longer on the subject, and indeed that dis> 



80 

are the terms of our national confederation, which scrupu- 
lously excludes the recognition of any thing more than that 
claim to service which the law of God admits. 4th. And 
lastly there is the law of a particular commonwealth, that 
is sovereign within its own territory and no farther. It is 
the attempt to press the definitions of such local law upon 
the terms of general laws which carefully exclude them, that 
has given rise to the threatening strife through which our 
nation is now passing. The attempt is made by one of two 
disputing parties to sanctify a form of despotic power, by the 
sacred name of property, unknown in such an application 
beyond the commonwealths that thus employ it ; and it is the 
resistance of this unfounded claim that raises the cry of in- 
justice, and even the threat of carnage. As though because 
marriage has the consent of all the nation, the law of a par- 
ticular state that should define a wife to be a chattel and 
authorize a corresponding treatment of her, should be the 
basis of a right to carry a wife as property beyond the terri- 
tory which such a law could cover. Let just claims be made, 
and let them be honored to their full extent. Let the hold- 
ers of slaves diminish their prerogative to such a claim of 
service as civil law has a right to admit, and then let master 
and slave pass through the world as freely as parent and 
child. — This is not a question of politics but of principle. 
There are those, no doubt, who pervert it to personal political 
uses. But no question of pure morals can become the subject 
of dispute among political parties, without being immediately 
subjected to such perversion. Its own intrinsic importance 
does not leave it upon that account. There only is the 
greater need that conscientious men should rescue it from its 
abuse, and place it upon its true ground, and in its true 
proportions before the nation. There is a serious misappre- 
hension prevailing, both among statesmen and others, as to 
the character of those who are interested in this struggle, and 
the ground of their interest. There is upon the one hand, a 
class of men who place the abolition of slavery above the 

grace to humanity is happily banished from Europe." — Vattel's Law of Nations, 
p. 356, § 152, (15 iii. ch. viii.) 



81 

Gospel and above all national interests, and who threaten to 
dissolve the Union if slavery shall be suffered to spread ; 
another class occupy the other extreme, and threaten to dis- 
solve the Union if slavery shall be forbidden to spread. May 
the day be far distant in which our destinies shall be intrust- 
ed to either of these. Between these, and utterly without 
sympathy in their extravagance, stands the great mass of our 
countrymen, divided in sentiment, indeed, but determined to 
use the best means for the true and lasting benefit of our 
nation. Of this mass of moderate men, many consider that 
the question of the extension of slavery is most safely ex- 
cluded from the national counsels, and left to decide itself. 
And there is another class as moderate as these and as true 
lovers of their whole country, who believe that for one man 
to hold another in involuntary bondage at the cost of any one 
interest of the latter, is clearly a sin against God, condemned 
equally by the Gospel and by the common principles of 
human justice. They hold that where the general legislation 
of our land extends, it has no more right to license such a 
sin, than to establish it. They hold that every voter of our 
land is himself a representative, and is charged with the in- 
terests of every human being whom his vote may affect, 
and especially of those who for any disability cannot vote 
in their own behalf. They hold that if the relation of 
master and slave, as it is sought to be extended, were 
known by our constitution beyond the limits of the laws 
which define it, the interests of the master might have a 
legal claim to superior consideration, though every moral 
claim to that consideration should be wanting ; but the re- 
striction put upon the extension of slavery by the very 
framers of that instrument, in connection with its own 
terms, carefully guarded, is claimed to have put its meaning 
so far beyond doubt, that no analogy now attempted between 
the rights of old States and of new ones can obscure it. 
Thus they hold that while, under the laws of particular 
States, the master may have legal rights above those of 
the slave ; apart from these laws, the constitution of the 
United States, and the law of God, place the two men upon 
6 



82 

a level ; and that for a citizen or a legislator to involve the 
general republic, the remotest recognition of that local claim 
of " property " in man, is a renewal of the original wrong of 
slavery, purely gratuitous and therefore criminal before God. 
These views may be just or unjust. But in a large proportion of 
those bosoms which entertain them, they are as far from political 
strife or self-aggrandizement as is the motive which prompts 
the feeding of the hungry. To include the class who indulge 
them in one sweeping designation of political agitators, is at 
least, a mistake, that can serve none of the uses of truth or 
patriotism. This conscientious opposition to the establish- 
ment, or the permission of slavery upon the national territory, 
is one of the forces at work throughout our land to-day ; and 
the statesman who ignores it, or attempts to override it, is 
like a sailor who makes no account of the gulf-stream or the 
trade-winds. 

The Christian Church has a most important duty to dis- 
charge concerning slavery. The principle that it is safe for 
her to deal with it as the apostles dealt with it, is strictly 
just. What can she do but approve without question what 
they did not condemn ? But how much more is she bound 
to approve ? Where they discriminated, is she commanded 
to be blind ? If the term slavery, in its current use through- 
out our countr}-, limited itself to the spirit of the apostles' 
rules for masters, definitions and distinctions would be no 
more called for upon that subject than upon that of marriage. 
A slaveholder would no more invite suspicion than a husband. 
But it is notorious that the term, in its received sense, de- 
scribes a relation utterly at variance with the apostles' words. 
Under such circumstances, the bare word slavery embodies 
no law for the Church of Christ, and the apostles are dis- 
honored, not by those who refuse to adopt so perverted a 
rule, but by those who consent to it. The husband of a score 
of wives has no right in a Christian Church, because marriage 
is lawful. Nor has one who is a slaveholder, according to the 
definition of Koman law or American, a right in a Christian 
Church, because there is a Christian way of holding slaves. 
In any community where the unlawful relation predominates, 



83 

the Church, to be faithful, must discriminate between the 
two. No abstract definition will be needed to effect its pur- 
pose. The question, What is lawful slaveholding? does not 
stalk about the country, seeking a challenger, but it chooses 
its time, and its place, and its men, and throws down the 
gauntlet. Every Church that has to do with slavery at all, 
must meet that question. It may do so by taking the con- 
venient nondescript term of "slavery," and making it a 
mantle of charity to cover that for which the Word of God 
has no charity ; and then it decides the case for slavery as 
men best understand the term, — surely for slavery as its mem- 
bers may choose to maintain it. It quibbles out of a question, 
which the apostles met like men, and leaves the Gospel and 
"the poor that hath no helper" to be the sufferers ; and makes 
infidelity and the cause of oppression to be the gainers. On 
the other hand, it may prudently avoid all action upon a 
subject so difficult, and decline the fellowship of those whose 
character of slaveholders would compel it to declare itself. 
But the prudence will not avail it ; it has only saved itself 
from condemning what is wrong, by seeming to all men to 
condemn what is right. It is a question that demands dis- 
tinctions. There is no deciding it in the mass. " Aye " or 
"Nay" is equally unjust ; and the question once propounded, 
to avoid it is impossible. The Church to which it has been 
addressed may act formally or informally ; it may decline it 
by vote, or decline it by refusing to vote, yet it cannot be 
silent ; for its silence is speech. But why should any part of 
the Christian Church, that meets the question of American 
slavery, seek to be silent concerning its unquestionable enor- 
mities ? Let Christian masters, who live by the rules of the 
Gospel, receive a cordial welcome into any Church of Christ. 
Or, if mere convenience, or a lawful expediency, proposes a 
different alliance, let the hearty right hand of Christian 
fellowship meet their advances, and dismiss them again as 
brethren in the Lord. But why should a wicked system of 
slavery be suffered to hang upon their skirts ? If prudence is 
the spell that charms the Church to silence, that is mistaken 
prudence that leaves the morals of the Gospel in obscurity ; 



84 



that, in the form of tolerating some real authority, tolerates 
as well the grossest oppression. If those same apostles, 
whom we hear vindicated with just and eloquent indignation 
from the charge of swerving before mighty sins, could come 
back again to find themselves quoted as authority for " slavery," 
and to hear " slavery " defined by Southern laws, and to see 
Christian citizens, tacitly at least, upholding those laws, what 
cry of "religion and politics" would paralyze their earnest 
speech? But their return is not needed. The Gospel is 
complete, and it only needs that the Church, in the duties of 
her ordinary discipline and instruction, should set it forth. 
With legislators, or politics, or this man's fear, or that man's 
anger, she, at least, has nothing to do — but with the morals of 
her members and the principles of her own action, as the 
Gospel defines them. Where the Gospel gives no rule, let 
her hold her peace ; but where the case is clear, let her speak. 
There is no power that can stand before the truth. The 
Gospel is in our land, not upon sufferance, but upon God's 
work and under God's care. Let the nation hear every word 
of it ; and, if it gives power, let it stand ; where it restrains, 
let it stop. 

In many most honorable instances the Church has spoken 
clearly, not only at a distance from the evils she has con- 
demned, but in the very midst of them. If the madness of 
Northern fanaticism has tended to silence other voices that 
would have spoken ere this, both the silence and the cause of 
it are to be deeply regretted. But it cannot be necessary for 
o-ood men in any capacity to compensate for the folly of some 
who have condemned where they should have approved, by 
approving what should be condemned. The truth is always 
safe. But it never stands firmer for being toppled over like a 
leaning tower. If there is a centre point of reason and jus- 
tice, let Christians rest there, and not swing to one extreme, 
because some other pendulum has swung to the other. 

To this consent shall good men come, both in Church and 
State. The result may be delayed, but it cannot be prevented. 
There shall be good will on earth, and peace toward men. 



85 

The Gospel of Christ has put an end to one system of slavery ; • 
it is struggling with another ; but it must conquer. 

" For right is right, since God is God, 
And right the day shall win ; 
To doubt -would he disloyalty, 
To falter -would be sin." 

To have contributed to such a result would be a blessing 
from God. To have labored for it is scarcely less. 



THE END. 



j *v*Ewji. 



Jin* * * * - 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



lil. Hill III mill lllll 
011 899 484 A 



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